BRUSSELS, March 21 (KUNA) -- The European Union's law enforcement agency, Europol, Thursday published a report which highlights that telecom fraud is on the rise. The cost of telecommunications fraud is estimated to be 29 billion euro (USD 33 billion) a year worldwide, it said in a press release.
At its heart, this fraud is the abuse of telecommunications products mainly telephones and mobile phones or services with the intention of illegally acquiring money from a communication service provider or its customers.
The main goal of criminals is to gain access to customers' or carriers' accounts, where debt can be incurred in the criminal's favour.
Geopolitically, most telecom crimes tend to be addressed by the telecom companies themselves The Cyber-Telecom Crime Report 2019 was jointly published by Europol, based at the Hague. and Trend Micro, a research and analysis group, based in the United States. (end) nk/rk