BEC Scams Have Caused $55 Billion in Losses Over the Past Ten Years

An FBI advisory warns that Business Email Compromise (BEC) has caused over $55B in losses from 2013–2023, with a 9% increase in exposed losses through December 2023, and notes evolving laundering paths via custodial accounts, payment processors, and cryptocurrency exchanges; it recommends defenses including secondary verification/MFA for account changes, strong unique passwords, URL and sender validation, vigilance for domain misspellings and phishing requests for PII, enabling full email headers, and regular financial account monitoring.