Trends in Cybersecurity and the Surge of Cyber-Fraud Against Citizens in Uzbekistan: An Empirical Analysis of Open Data

Abstract

Rapid digitalization of payments has been accompanied in Uzbekistan by an extraordinary rise in cybercrime, dominated by cyber-fraud that directly drains citizens' money. Drawing only on open official and authoritative sources, this paper assembles the fragmented public record into a single empirical picture and reads it against global trends. Official figures indicate a roughly 68-fold growth of cybercrime over 2019–2024, about 59,000 cybercrimes in 2024 (a 9.1-fold rise on 2023), a jump in the cybercrime share of all registered crime from 6.2% in 2023 to about 42% by mid-2025, and citizen losses exceeding 1.9 trillion UZS over 2021–2024, of which 603 billion UZS fell in 2024 alone. Bank cards are implicated in 98% of cases, and the episode structure is led by malware (60%), phishing for one-time codes (16%), marketplace fraud (11%), direct social- engineering deception (9%), and fraudulent online lending (4%). These national patterns mirror the global shift, documented by ENISA and the FBI IC3, toward human-centered social engineering increasingly amplified by artificial intelligence. We analyse drivers, situate the national response (the 2022 Cybersecurity Law, an ITU Global Cybersecurity Index score of 89.20, and dedicated police capacity), and propose a four-level countermeasures model (legal, technical, organizational, educational) in which each measure is tied to the evidence and to the role of law-enforcement bodies. The study is a secondary-data analysis; its limitations and the need for primary, victim-level data are discussed.