Scams are always harder to detect during the holiday season as consumers expect deep discounts at the time and are likely to believe prices that would normally seem too good to be true. On top of it, prevailing inflation may make people hungrier for discounts.
Scammers love to exploit seasonal opportunities. During this time, cyberscammers will try to trick you into giving up your personal information and your hard-earned money for products, services or “lottery winnings” that never arrive.
Cybercrimes have increased manifold in recent years, with monetary estimates of global 2020 losses at around $945 billion. The annual cost of cybercrime could cross $10 trillion, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. The types of attacks and targeted sectors have also evolved.
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Top Five Cybercrime Predictions For 2024
1. Cybersecurity experts fear advances in Artificial Intelligence will make scamming easier. As language and video AI models develop further, scammers are expected to imitate real people with deepfakes to trick people into giving over their personal and financial information.
2. Companies operating with smaller staff could experience a rise in data breaches and ransomware attacks. Short-staffed firms with little defence capacity have become easy targets, with digitalisation of industries increasing vulnerabilities across supply chains.
3. Experts expect a jump in crimes, such as shopping deal scams that steal personal information or fail to deliver the order, financial-based scams such as fake government assistance programmes and romance scams asking consumers for money or gift cards.
4. Every IT position is also a cybersecurity position now. Every IT worker needs to be involved with protecting people from cybercrimes. Cybersecurity Ventures expects the world will have 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs globally, enough to fill 50 NFL stadiums.
5. Cryptocrime could conveniently cost the world $30 billion annually by 2025. Criminals’ attention to cryptocurrency is manifesting in a range of ways, including direct exchange hacks and scams to trick people into handing over their holdings for false purposes.
