£3m stolen by hacking fraudsters in region

POLICE ACROSS Yorkshire have received more than 1,000 reports of social media and email hacking in one year with people losing more than £3m in total, latest figures reveal.

The county’s largest police force – West Yorkshire Police – had 539 reported cases during 2020, the fourth highest in the country in that year.

South Yorkshire Police reported 240 cases, followed by North Yorkshire Police with 205 and Humberside Police with 195.

There were a total of 13,343 cases of social media and email hacking reported to the 43 police forces across England and Wales during 2020, a study by AddictiveTips.com found.

During this period, April (1,449 cases) was the worst month, followed by May (1,358 cases). While September saw the least number of cases at 870.

Additionally, from the 13,343 cases, the accumulative financial loss that victims suffered was £3,573,079.

The Metropolitan Police had the highest amount of social media and email hacking cases during 2020, with 2,357 reports, the equivalent of six incidents per day. From the 2,357 cases, the collective financial loss victims suffered was £1.8m – equivalent to £764 per case.

Police are now urging people to make sure they take the necessary precautions to avoid becoming a victim of this type of fraud.

AddictiveTips.com has also urged people to make sure they don’t make life easy for hackers by ensuring they have strong passwords which they change every three months.

People are also urged to ensure they opt in to multi-factor authentication – where you must provide at least two pieces of personal information to verify your identity.

Other safety tips include carefully assessing third-party applications and people should not open new accounts by using existing credentials.