The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said today that the number of identity theft reports has doubled during 2020 when compared to 2019, reaching a record 1.4 million reports within a single year. The FTC claimed that: “After the government expanded unemployment benefits to people left jobless by the pandemic, cybercriminals filed unemployment claims using other people’s personal information.”
Throughout 2020, the FTC received 394,280 reports of government benefit fraud attempts, while in 2019 this number was only 12,900. On top of this, cybercriminals reportedly also exploited government-sponsored small business loan programmes by stealing business or personal information from small business owners.
