Welcome to the Oregon FBI’s Tech Tuesday segment. Today: Building a digital defense by being cyber aware!

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (www.ic3.gov) just released its annual report for 2020, and here’s what it had to say about the scams that Oregon victims are facing:

The FBI received the most complaints in Oregon about extortion (1,440) and non-payment/non-delivery scams (1,242).

• Extortion: obtaining money or property through intimidation or undue exercise of authority. It may include threats of physical harm, criminal prosecution, or public exposure.
• Non-Payment/Non-Delivery: In non-payment situations, goods and services are shipped, but payment is never rendered. In non-delivery situations, payment is sent, but goods and services are never received.

In terms of dollars lost, Oregon victims were most impacted by business email compromise scams (BEC) or email account compromise scams (EAC) ($10,940,974 total), romance fraud ($8,328,322), identity theft ($6,652,823), and personal data breaches ($6,504,675).

• Business Email Compromise/email Account Compromise: BEC is a scam targeting businesses working with foreign suppliers and/or businesses regularly performing wire transfer payments. EAC is a similar scam which targets individuals. These sophisticated scams are carried out by fraudsters compromising email accounts through social engineering or computer intrusion techniques to conduct unauthorized transfer of funds.

By age group, seniors 60 years and older are far and away the most likely targets in Oregon with the greatest money losses (1,775 victims with reported losses of $12,817, 393), but people under the age of 20 represent the highest per-person losses ($20,842).

You can check out all of Oregon’s numbers in the FBI’s Internet Crime Report at https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2020State/StateReport.aspx#?s=41 or the full report at https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2020_IC3Report.pdf.

If you believe you are a victim of an online scam, you should report the incident to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov or call your FBI local office.