MOSCOW, January 6. /TASS/. The number of cybercrimes committed in Russia over the last few years went down, the press service of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office told TASS.
"After a significant slowdown in 2021 in the growth rate of crimes committed using information and communication technologies, in 2022 we continued to observe a downward trend in the number of such unlawful acts. For eleven months (of 2022), their number has decreased by 4.9% compared to the same period last year (from 494,100 to 470,100)," the press service reported, citing data for eleven months of the previous year.
The number of crimes committed with the use of plastic cards decreased by 24.7% (from 154,500 to 116,300), with the number of crimes with the use of mobile phones dropping by 5.6% (from 291,300 to 190,000). At the same time, there was a slight increase of 1.9% (from 335,900 to 342,500) in crimes involving Internet.
"Among the crimes of this category, more than half are either theft (104,000) or fraud (224,000). The number of thefts went down by 28.4% over the last year, while the number of fraudulent acts, by contrast, increased by 4.4%," the Prosecutor General's Office said. In addition, the investigators noted an increase in other types of white-collar crimes. So, although extortion accounts for less than 1% of all crimes in the digital sphere, the number of such crimes is increasing, having reached 5,100 in eleven months of the last year. Also, the number of drugs trafficking cybercrimes remains significant (57,000).