According to the Financial Market Authority (FMA), financial fraud is a ‘growth industry’: the total loss from financial fraud reported to the FMA was approximately €15.5 million in 2024; last year it amounted to 12.8 million euros, the authority said on Monday. The number of crypto fraud cases has almost doubled.
According to the FMA, there was even an increase from 244 to 409 cases. In 2024, a total of 840 people contacted the authority’s consumer hotline – the highest reported loss by a private individual was €996,109.
The FMA’s warnings about people and companies not being allowed to offer and carry out financial services and transactions that require a license also reached a record level in 2024. The warning messages are published on the FMA website and on the electronic announcement and information platform (EVI) of the federal government.
There were a total of 145 investor warnings this year; in 2022 there were 84 and in 2023 106. In 2024, most of the warnings concerned “fraudulent trading platforms offering services related to financial products (…)”.
More and more financial fraud through deepfakes
The number of financial frauds is increasing partly because fraudsters are among the first to “adopt new technologies and use them for illegal purposes”.
In 2024, there was an increasing number of so-called ‘celebrity scams’, where fraud victims were contacted via social networks using deepfake posts featuring celebrities who had allegedly become wealthy through secret investments. “Even though their methods are modern, the stories they use to seduce their victims are always the same. High profit with low risk, secret investment tricks that the banks do not reveal,” said FMA board members Helmut Ettl and Eduard Müller in the broadcast.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
