Global cost of cybercrime may reach 10.5 trillion USD by 2025: Interpol official

NEW DELHI, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- Incidents of cybercrime and online child abuse are significantly underreported, and the global cost of cybercrime is expected to reach 10.5 trillion U.S. dollars by 2025, said Interpol Secretary General Jurgen Stock in the Indian capital on Monday.

Addressing media ahead of Interpol's 90th General Assembly, which begins in New Delhi on Tuesday, Stock said that organized crime networks were making billions of dollars, and the fact that less than 1 percent of global illicit financial flows were intercepted and recovered should be of greater concern to everyone.

The four-day Interpol event would see the participation of delegations from 195 Interpol members comprising ministers, police chiefs, heads of national central bureaus and senior police officers.

The General Assembly is Interpol's supreme governing body and meets once a year to make key decisions related to its functioning.

The secretary general further said that Interpol had developed its global stop-payment mechanism, the Anti-Money Laundering Rapid Response Protocol, which in the past 10 months alone had helped members recover more than 60 million U.S. dollars in criminal proceeds from cyber-enabled fraud.

"Our Global Crime Trend Report also highlighted the massive increase in online child sexual exploitation and abuse, figures which are only set to increase. We know that cybercrime and online child abuse are significantly underreported, often because victims are ashamed or in cases of fraud, embarrassed, which means that the figures we see are just the tip of the iceberg," Stock said.

Police around the world are overwhelmed with data, and too often they do not have the capacity to deal with the volume of cases, and here Interpol is uniquely placed to provide the support they need, he said.