With less street crime, Brazil records 1 fraud every 16 seconds

Every 16 seconds, a fraud scam is committed in Brazil, according to data from the Brazilian Public Security Yearbook released this Thursday (18). There were almost 2 million cases registered in 2023, an increase of 8.2% compared to the previous year.

This type of crime has been growing since 2018 (up 360% in five years), but it was during the Covid-19 pandemic that the type became more recurrent than street crimes, which fell by 10.8% from 2022 to 2023. There were 870,320 cases of property theft, compared to 1,965,353 fraud scams last year.

As with other crimes, the dynamics are quite diverse across Brazil, with states recording drops of more than double digits – Amapá (reduction of 16.8%) and Sergipe (-10%) – and others with significant increases.

The biggest increase in fraud records occurred in São Paulo, the richest state in the federation, with an increase of 22.7% and more than 750 thousand occurrences.

The Yearbook provides separate lists of conventional fraud cases and those committed through electronic crimes, when the state police make this distinction – only five do not have this data broken down, but this list includes two of the three most populous states, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In this modality, the national increase was 13.6%.

In cases of street crimes, the biggest reductions were recorded in robberies of commercial establishments (down 18.8%), residential establishments (17.3%), passers-by (13.8%), cargo (13.2%), vehicles (12.4%) and cell phones (10.1%).

Specifically regarding mobile phones, the Yearbook highlights an unprecedented inversion of the preferred method of criminals, with a greater number of cases of theft – when the item is stolen without the use of violence – compared to theft of devices.

Still, it is estimated that almost 1 million cell phones were stolen or robbed throughout Brazil in 2023.