Victims of cybercrime lost nearly P198 billion in 2024 as complaints handled by Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) reached 10,004 cases—a threefold increase from the 3,317 complaints in 2023.
CICC executive director Alexander Ramos attributed the exponential increase in complaints to the growing cybercrime awareness of the public and their willingness to report.
“In previous years, people were not aware that they were being scammed and many were not also aware on where to file their complaints,” he said.
“We also owe this to our partners who have been encouraging the public to report to our hotline or through other channels and platforms,” Ramos said.
Based on the CICC complaints, consumer fraud accounted for 3,534 or 35 percent of the total complaints received. These included non-delivery of goods or services (86 percent) and fake advertisement (8 percent).
Complaints on online fraud accounted for 3,242 or 32 percent. These figures included financial fraud (957), impersonification (920), job scam (396), investment scam (396) and love scam (72).
Other types of complaints received included unsolicited communication, illegal access, identity theft, sexual cybercrime, phishing and cyber libel.
The CICC statistics show that GCash was the top wallet used by victims of consumer fraud, online fraud and phishing recording a loss of P76.49 million. Other financial platforms used by victims included BPI (P28.47 million), GoTyme (P15.38 million) and Maya (P13.99 million).
Victims of scams are advised to call the Inter-Agency Response Center (IARC) hotline 1326 which is toll-free and operates round-the-clock from Mondays to Sundays including holidays.