Scams are rife, especially online: in 2017 hackers stole $172 billion (£130.7bn) from 978 million people across 20 different countries, according to Norton. In fact, these days you're far more likely to be robbed online than mugged in the street. We take a look at 2018's most notorious scams and online attacks. 

"Number spoofing" scams are when fraudsters are able to hide behind the mask of your bank's number, making it seem like they are genuinely your bank. The result of bank data leaks means it's been catching quite a few people out in 2018.

Read: 20 secrets banks don't want you to know about

In June 2018, British newspaper The Sun reported the case of Joan Wilson, 61, who lost $52,897 (£40k) in a "number spoofing" scam. Thinking that she was on the phone to her bank she was tricked into giving the scammers a code generated by her home card reader, and enabled them to get hold of her money. In January 2018, loveMONEY reported on a similar bank text scandal that was sending texts supposedly from HSBC.

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Thankfully the FBI seized the key domain that was used to infect the routers after a month. It traced the work to a hacking group called Sofacy – which also goes by the names of Fancy Bear, Sednit and Pawn Storm – a network which is no stranger to hacking scandals: it was behind the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee.

Read about The secrets hackers know to steal your money

The Dridex banking trojan has been around for a couple of years now but it continues to infect computers, mainly in the UK and US, as the latest version Dridex 4.8 was released in December 2017. The trojan, which gathers sensitive financial information for fraudulent purposes, conceals itself in a seemingly harmless Word or Excel attachment which, when downloaded, activates a macro to infect the system.

This trojan targets individuals and businesses alike – and the attachments are getting more sophisticated, with some being sent as scanned documents from office printers and copiers. You know the drill, always think twice about opening or downloading anything you're not 100% sure about, and if you are infected there are tools that you can download in order to rid your system of the bug.

Read these 16 common email scams and how to spot them

In June 2018 the email addresses of an undisclosed number of Reddit users were accessed by hackers. Reddit reported the issue to law enforcement and is cooperating with the investigation. Reddit also messaged user accounts if there was a chance the credentials taken reflected the account’s current password. 

The brands affected by this large scale data breach are W Hotels, Sheraton, Le Meridien, and Four Points by Sheraton, and could see the Marriott Hotel Group hit by a very hefty GDPR fine once the UK's data regulator has finished its investigation. Marriott has set up a website for affected customers.