States With the Most and Least Cybercrime
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Alaska has the highest amount of cyber fraud per person every year while West Virginia has the least, according to a recent report.
Cybercrime has become a growing concern for governments, businesses and individuals over the last several years, according to a study by Beyond Identity. Cybercrime accounted for $3.3 billion in losses in 2020 in the U.S., nearly double the amount from 2010, the study says.
According to TechTarget, cybercrime is any criminal activity that involves a computer, networked device or a network. While most cybercrimes are carried out to generate profit for the cybercriminals, some cybercrimes are against computers or devices directly to damage or disable them, TechTarget says.
According to the study, the places with the most cyber fraud per person annually are:
- Alaska—$500
- New Mexico—$420
- California—$407
- Washington—$400
- Nevada—$400
- Delaware—$400
- Washington, D.C.—$399
- Florida—$384
- North Dakota—$381
- Arizona—$374
Meanwhile, the states with the least cyber fraud per person are:
- West Virginia—$205
- Kentucky—$210
- Maine—$211
- Mississippi—$213
- Rhode Island—$229
- Ohio—$230
- New Hampshire—$231
- Missouri—$236
- Indiana—$240
- Wisconsin—$249
Cybercrimes Soar in Last Decade
Cybercrime reports have increased in the past decade, with over 4.7 million reports in the U.S. in 2020, according to the study. This represents an increase of over 300% from 2010 to 2020 baseline.
Cybercrime has also increased in eight of the last 10 years and the two years it decreased represented very modest drops, the study contends. Covid-19 has been a contributing factor to cybercrime. The pandemic led to many Americans spending more time in front of screens, broadening their digital footprints, and possibly increasing their overall vulnerability to cyberattacks in the process, according to the study. A move to remote work has led to workers accessing their work devices from across the country, which makes it difficult for businesses to secure their network and devices from potential cybercrimes.
Over the past year, cybercriminals have stolen billions of dollars from U.S. pandemic recovery efforts. And these crimes are far more organized and occurring on a larger scale than what many federal, state or local government officials expected. But the greatest theft is the billions being stolen from state unemployment benefit systems—systems that weren’t designed to identify or to stop this type of cybercrime, wrote former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Linda Miller of Grant Thorton.
Using the Consumer Sentinel Network annual reports for 2010 and 2020, Beyond Identity analyzed the trends in identity theft and fraud in the U.S. to calculate the states with the largest and smallest increases in those numbers per capita in the last decade.
For more information from Beyond Identity’s study click here.
Andre Claudio is an assistant editor at Route Fifty.
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