MOSCOW, May 24. /TASS/. A recently reported increase in the number of cyber-crimes in Russia poses a threat to the national security, a senior official with the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office told TASS.

"In the recent years, a number of crimes committed with the use of information and communication technologies assumed a scale that can be viewed as a threat to the national security," Andrei Nekrasov, a head of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office Department of Organizational and Analytical Management, said.

"This threat is particularly dangerous considering a low solvency rate of such crimes, which currently stands at less than 25%," he said adding that an issue of providing security in the sphere of modern information and communication technologies had turned into an extremely important topic today.

Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov announced in late April that Phone and online fraud, as well as bank card theft amounted to a quarter of all crimes recorded in Russia.

According to him, although the overall number of crimes in Russia went up 1% last year, in 2020, like in the preceding periods, the portion of serious and particularly grave offences went up significantly (by 14%).

Delivering his annual report to the Russian Federation Council (upper house of parliament).on April 23, Krasnov noted that in many ways "this is due to the ongoing and ominous rise in crimes committed with the use of information and communication technologies."

"In a year, they jumped from 294,000 (in 2019) to 510,000, by 74%. If this development cannot be stopped, soon they will dominate the crime structure (as of today, they account for 25% of all recorded crimes)," he stated.