Cybercrime cases tripled since 2019

While the number of burglaries, robberies, and muggings is historically low in the Netherlands, the number of cybercrime cases is skyrocketing. The police received three times more cybercrime reports last year than in 2019. The shift from physical to digital crimes that occurred in the pandemic seems to be here to stay, specialist Rene Middag of the police’s National Unit said to AD.

The police registered almost 797,000 crimes in 2022, 7 percent more than a year earlier and almost at the 2019 level before the pandemic. The police note that crime figures are rising sharply again, but they are different in nature.

There was a slight increase in the “classic crimes” since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, but their number remains low compared to 2019. The number of robberies was 43 percent lower last year than in 2019, burglaries fell 38 percent, and muggings decreased by 34 percent. The number of cybercrime cases, on the other hand, almost tripled, rising from 4,715 reports in 2019 to 13,949 last year.

According to Middag, there was a major upswing in online scams and fraud during the coronavirus pandemic, when people spent much more time at home and afforded robbers, burglars, and muggers much less opportunity to target them. And that shift seems to be lasting. “The knowledge to commit crimes online is widely shared, and it is easy to do from home,” Middag said.