YEREVAN. – The number of cybercrimes has increased in recent years. Sasun Grigoryan, a senior investigator at the Cybercrime and High Technology Crimes Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of Armenia, stated this.

According to him, in the case when last year there were 118 cases of cybercrime been investigated by the aforesaid department—and 64 of which were about computer fraud, a total of 94 such cases have already been registered in the first half of this year alone.

Grigoryan noted that such crimes are related to latent cases. According to him, the issue is not that their number has been small before, and it’s just that people have started to apply more often.

Answering the question about the most common cybercrimes, Grigoryan clarified that fraudulent payment of passport, bank data or services is more observed in Armenia. As per the investigator, there are no clear data yet, but such crimes have increased during the current COVID-19 pandemic, and this is explained by the decrease in physical transactions and the increase in virtual transactions.

According to Sasun Grigoryan, as a rule, primarily people who have financial problems become victims of such fraud.