‘Number of reports of internet crime in Germany rises by 80 percent’

A report by the German police, the annual ‘Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik’, shows that the number of reports of internet crime in Germany increased by 80 percent between 2015 and 2016. This concerns a total of approximately 82,000 reports.

The newspaper Die Welt has published figures from the report presented on Monday by the German interior minister. The reports concern internet crime ‘in the strict sense’, although it is not clear which reports exactly fall under this. In other categories, such as fraud, data stealing and ‘computer sabotage’, there is less growth. In the case of fraud, there is a decrease of 37.5 percent. In the case of sabotage, which includes a DDO attack, for example, the increase amounts to 25 percent.

A spokesman for the police union BDK tells the newspaper that the statistics give a distorted picture of reality, because many cases of internet crime go unreported. He assumes that this applies to 90 percent of all crimes. The newspaper also writes that the German BKA has been collecting statistics on internet crime since 2014. Since 2016, some fraud crimes have also been classified as internet crime, which makes it difficult to make a comparison with the previous year.