Cybercrime
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50 free Cybercrime trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cybercrime has grown from teenage pranks on dial-up lines into a business that shuts down hospitals, fuel supplies and whole government departments. The stories behind it are stranger than fiction: heists foiled by a typo, kingpins undone by one careless email, and gangs betrayed by their own leaders. This quiz covers the crimes themselves, from romance scams and ransomware to the slang that fraudsters and investigators use, along with famous hackers, dark web markets, huge crypto thefts and the police stings that followed. A few questions look at the laws and the films the subject has inspired. It is pitched for curious general players as well as security fans. If you have ever wondered whether a suspicious text, a hoax call or a lookalike web address counts as a cybercrime, and what it is called, you will find out here, with a short explanation after every question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which file-sharing site did the FBI shut in 2012 as New Zealand police raided Kim Dotcom's mansion?
Megaupload
Megaupload was accused of operating as a business dedicated to copyright infringement. Its German-born founder, born Kim Schmitz, was arrested at a leased estate near Auckland, one of the country's priciest homes.
Q 02Where was Ross Ulbricht sitting when the FBI arrested him for running the Silk Road drug market?
A public library
A public library in San Francisco was where the FBI pounced, after two agents posed as quarrelling lovers to distract him. A third grabbed the open laptop before he could encrypt it.
Q 03The Mirai botnet that took down major websites in 2016 was first aimed at servers for which game?
Minecraft
Minecraft servers were the first targets, because Mirai's authors were running a protection racket against their hosts. The botnet itself was built from hijacked home routers and internet cameras.
Q 04Which unreleased game did a teenage Lapsus$ hacker leak using an Amazon Fire Stick in a hotel room?
Grand Theft Auto VI
Grand Theft Auto VI clips spread online in 2022 after Arion Kurtaj broke into Rockstar with the Fire Stick, a hotel TV and a phone. He was on bail at the time and police had taken his laptop.
Q 05The 1989 AIDS Trojan, the first documented ransomware, reached its victims through the post on what?
Floppy disks
Floppy disks labelled as AIDS information were mailed out by biologist Joseph Popp. After 90 start-ups the program scrambled file names and demanded $189, payable to a post office box in Panama.
Q 06Which fraud, seen in Superman III and Office Space, skims fractions of a cent off many transactions?
Salami slicing
Salami slicing is named for cutting a sausage one thin slice at a time, so no single loss gets noticed. In 2008 a man was arrested for collecting a few cents at a time through 58,000 fake brokerage accounts.
Q 07A teenager's 2020 bitcoin scam hijacked Barack Obama's and Elon Musk's accounts on which platform?
Twitter employees were manipulated into giving up their logins, which opened the company's internal tools to the hackers. Graham Ivan Clark, a 17-year-old from Florida, was charged as an adult on 30 felony counts.
Q 08Engineers Arup lost about $25 million when a Hong Kong employee joined a video call faked with what?
AI deepfakes
AI deepfakes copied the faces and voices of senior Arup officials on the call. Convinced the meeting was real, the employee paid the fraudsters in a string of separate transfers.
Q 09Which scam from China builds a fake online romance, then steers victims into bogus crypto schemes?
Pig butchering
Pig butchering likens winning a victim's trust to fattening a hog before the slaughter. Interpol now prefers the name romance baiting, fearing the original label shames victims into silence.
Q 10A misspelled order helped stop hackers taking almost $1 billion from which country's central bank?
Bangladesh
Bangladesh still lost $81 million, which vanished into casinos in the Philippines. The thieves sent 35 payment orders over the SWIFT network, and the New York Fed blocked 30 of them.
Q 11Which hoax-call crime, named for an armed police unit, sends officers to an innocent person's home?
Swatting
Swatting turned deadly in 2017, when a hoax call over a Call of Duty dispute led police to shoot an uninvolved man in Wichita, Kansas. The caller was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.
Q 12Which word describes publishing someone's home address and other private details online to harass them?
Doxxing
Doxxing grew out of 1990s hacker feuds, in which 'dropping dox' on a rival was an old-school revenge tactic. The word is a respelling of docs, short for documents.
Q 13Which crime secretly uses a stranger's computer, often via a website, to mine coins such as Monero?
Cryptojacking
Q 21Which hacker blamed time in solitary on a claim that whistling into a phone could start nuclear war?
Kevin Mitnick
Kevin Mitnick said officials convinced a judge he could launch missiles by whistling into a prison payphone. Caught in 1995 after two and a half years as a fugitive, he later became a security consultant.
Q 22Hacker Albert Gonzalez robbed TJX of millions of card numbers while informing for which US agency?
Secret Service
Secret Service agents had let him avoid jail in return for evidence against his ShadowCrew forum. He went on to take 45.6 million card numbers from TJX and was sentenced to 20 years.
Q 23Vladimir Levin was seized at a London airport in 1995 for wiring $10 million out of which bank?
Cryptojacking was dominated by Coinhive, a script behind over two-thirds of cases before it shut down in 2019. Criminals favour privacy coins because their transaction histories are hidden.
Q 14Which fraud has criminals talk phone company staff into moving a victim's number to a new card?
SIM swapping
SIM swapping hands the thief every text-message code that banks and email services send as a second login step. Some gangs skip the smooth talk and simply bribe telecom employees.
Q 15Which trick registers web addresses one letter off famous ones to catch people who hit a wrong key?
Typosquatting
Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, pays off in several ways: the lookalike page can show adverts, install malware or copy a brand's login form to harvest passwords.
Q 16Which word for phishing by text borrows its first letters from the name of the texting standard?
Smishing
Smishing joins SMS and phishing, and the bait is usually a message posing as a trusted sender with a malicious link. The voice-call version of the trick is called vishing.
Q 17What name is given to someone who moves stolen funds through their own bank account for a small cut?
Money mule
Money mule recruits are often hired through adverts for 'payment processing agents' and may not know the cash is criminal. The role keeps the real fraudsters at a distance from the risky transfer.
Q 18Which attack tries passwords stolen from one site on many others, betting that people reuse them?
Credential stuffing
Credential stuffing works because so many people recycle logins: in one survey, 81% of users had reused a password on two or more sites. Attackers automate the attempts on a huge scale.
Q 19Which crypto scam hit buyers of a Squid Game token in 2021 when its makers vanished with the cash?
Rug pull
Rug pull is crypto slang for creators who hype a coin and then abscond with the funds put in. The Squid token carried a warning sign: buyers found they were not allowed to resell it.
Q 20Which attack, shown at the 2010 Black Hat conference, makes a cash machine spit out its banknotes?
Jackpotting
Jackpotting had its showpiece when New Zealand hacker Barnaby Jack made two ATMs spew notes on stage. He had planted malware that dispensed currency on his command.
Citibank
Citibank's dial-up wire transfer service let the Russian shift corporate customers' funds to accomplices in five countries. Scotland Yard caught him changing planes at Stansted.
Q 24Which Russian gang's alleged boss, Maksim Yakubets, drove a Lamborghini with a 'thief' number plate?
Evil Corp
Evil Corp's leader was described in Russian media as the hacker who stole $100 million, and the US put a $5 million bounty on him. His wedding, to an FSB officer's daughter, was just as lavish.
Q 25Which fake cryptocurrency did 'Cryptoqueen' Ruja Ignatova sell before vanishing on a 2017 flight?
OneCoin
OneCoin was called one of the biggest scams in history by The Times. Its founder boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens, was never seen again and joined the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 2022.
Q 26Online rapper Heather Morgan and her husband laundered bitcoin stolen in 2016 from which exchange?
Bitfinex
Bitfinex lost 119,756 bitcoins, worth about $72 million at the time. The share US agents recovered in 2022 was by then valued at $3.6 billion, and her husband admitted carrying out the hack himself.
Q 27Which hacking crew that knocked the CIA website offline in 2011 was betrayed by its leader 'Sabu'?
LulzSec
LulzSec co-founder Hector Monsegur, alias Sabu, spent over ten months as an FBI informant while facing a possible 124 years in prison. He helped agents identify the group's other hackers.
Q 28Aaron Swartz, a Reddit co-owner, faced up to 35 years in prison for bulk-downloading which archive?
JSTOR
JSTOR articles were pulled down by a computer he had wired into the MIT network from an unlocked closet. Prosecutors answered with two counts of wire fraud and eleven computer-crime charges.
Q 29The four men behind The Pirate Bay were each sentenced to a year in jail in 2009 in which country?
Sweden
Sweden's Stockholm District Court also fined the four 30 million kronor for promoting copyright infringement. When the Supreme Court refused an appeal in 2012, the site moved to a .se address.
Q 30Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht took his alias, Dread Pirate Roberts, from a character in which film?
The Princess Bride
The Princess Bride makes its pirate a title passed from one man to the next. Ulbricht's lawyers leaned on that at trial, admitting he founded the site but arguing someone else had taken over the alias.