Cybercrime of all stripes cost victims globally more than $16 billion dollars last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a report released on Wednesday.
The losses—a one-third increase over 2023—were largely driven by low tech scams, such as would-be investors swindled out of money online, or company employees tricked by deceptive emails into wiring large sums to criminals’ bank accounts. Tech support and romance scams also caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, the bureau said.
The figures were collated by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which has become a clearinghouse for reports of digital fraud and hacking, and drew on nearly 860,000 complaints, the bureau said.
Losses from cybercrime are notoriously hard to calculate. The FBI’s figures are among the most comprehensive, but the bureau acknowledged that its calculations were incomplete, particularly with regard to ransomware, a particularly destructive breed of software used by hackers to extort organizations into making ransom payments in return for their data.
While the complaints gathered by the FBI came from around the world, the overwhelming majority were filed in the U.S.For those seven years, Hunt claimed heavy losses on his multi-peril crop insurance policy, including a high of $322,000 in 2015. The crop insurance program paid a total of $1.49 million, the court documents show. All the while, his farm sold plenty of produce but disguised the sales through the use of family members’ names.
“Hunt knew none of these individuals had an insurable interest in the crops sold in their names and intentionally withheld these sales from the crop loss adjuster,” the plea agreement explains. “This obscured Hunt’s true production and resulted in inflated insurance losses.”
Hunt also used different addresses for his children to further conceal his actual grain sales.
He now faces up to 30 years in prison, forfeiture of his property, restitution to the insurance program, and a maximum fine of $1 million.
This is the latest guilty plea in multiple federal investigations into crop insurance fraud in Kentucky. One of the largest crimes involved a tobacco farmer, who pleaded guilty last year to more than $9 million in crop insurance fraud. Since 2017, authorities have charged more than 30 people in the state with crop insurance fraud, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
