Field agents from Washington D.C. and New York confirm financial cybercrime is on the rise
Cybercrime is on an upward trajectory, with the United States alone experiencing a 33% increase in cybercrime-related losses in 2024 compared to the year before. Many of these offences are cross-border in nature, requiring multilateral partnerships at the local, regional, and national level.
The United States Secret Service are in Bermuda this week to lead a number of workshops on the matter, providing training to the Bermuda Police Service’s financial crimes unit.
Joined by U.S. Consul General Antoinette Hurtado and Governor Andrew Murdoch, Patrick Freaney—Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Secret Service’s New York field office—reaffirmed the importance of keeping up to speed on technological developments in the digital sphere.
“In 2024 in the United States alone there was $9.3 billion dollars in loss associated with cryptocurrency—financial crime is global, and that’s why this type of training is so important. To share best practices and lessons learned, it helps the global law enforcement community provide the best service to the communities they serve.”
Kali Smith, an Administrative Professional, and Technical program manager in the U.S. Secret Service’s Cyber Operations Section of the Criminal Investigative Division says that cryptocurrency scams are not victimless crimes, encouraging members of the public who find themselves on the receiving end of a cyber offence to step forward and speak up.
“With cyber infrastructure, oftentimes the victim has been socially-engineered, they have no control over the matter, so victims sometimes think that they did something wrong or that they could have prevented this when that’s often not the case at all.”
You can watch the televised interview with U.S. Consul General Antoinette Hurtado, Governor Andrew Murdoch, Assistant Commissioner of Police Antoine Daniels, and the U.S. Secret Service’s Kali Smith and Patrick Freaney, below:
