Americans lost close to a billion dollars to AI scams in one year – and cybersecurity experts fear this is only the beginning.
Nearly $900 million was stolen in scams that incorporated AI in 2025, according to the first report of its kind from the FBI. The bureau also received more than 22,000 reports about such schemes to its Internet Crime Complaint Center.
One woman in California lost more than $5,000 when a scammer used AI to impersonate her daughter’s voice. Another woman in Ohio lost $1.5 million after fake FBI agents convinced her to drain her bank accounts.
Internet scams are not new; they’ve been around as long as people have been logging on. Fake Nigerian prince emails, phishing schemes and all types of malware have long been digital landmines for people surfing the web. But AI is now changing the cyber con game and costing Americans millions in the process — a number that is only going to grow as AI improves, which it does by the nanosecond.
Michael Machtinger, deputy assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, told the Wall Street Journal that AI-created fraudulent communications “can look very official and very legitimate to even the most trained individuals.”
As AI companies pitch the public on the urgency of adopting their technology, criminals have been more than willing to heed that advice.
Like everyone else playing around with Claude, Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT, scammers are still figuring out exactly what they can pull off using the chatbots, according to Jake Braun, executive director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.
He told the WSJ that as AI continues to improve, the means by which criminals can use it to bilk people out of their money will likely only get more sophisticated too.
“The AI companies like to say that today’s AI is the worst AI you will ever use. What’s also true is that these are the lowest number of AI complaints we are ever going to see,” he told the paper.
Bob Sullivan, host of AARP podcast The Perfect Scam, explained in March that AI has helped scammers flood the internet with fraudulent offers and malicious schemes.
“We’re getting deluged,” Sullivan said. “A couple of years ago, you might have encountered one or two AI-generated scams a year. Now scammer call centers are sending out tens of thousands of scam messages per minute.”
Consumer protection agencies have collected long lists of all the various ways scammers are using AI to try to rip people off. Both California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation and New York City’s Consumer Worker and Protection agency have compiled lists of the methods criminals are using.
A new spin on an old grift is the use of deepfakes to convince people they’re talking to someone they trust — or someone they want to trust like a celebrity or a public figure — in order to convince them to send them money. AI scammers might deepfake a photo or a video of a relative in a tough situation or a celebrity as a means of establishing credibility.
Romance schemes follow a similar tack, using fake images or videos — or even voices — of attractive people or celebrities to convince a victim that they’re interested in them. Once trust has been secured, that’s when the scam hits. The account will then ask the person for money or assistance, and with people’s emotions clouding their judgment, they have been known to fork over thousands of dollars.
While some criminals seek to exploit concern for loved ones or a desire for romance, others appeal to greed.
According to law enforcement agencies, some scammers have created entirely fictional influencers to convince people to invest in fake businesses or to support their non-existent work.
Earlier this year, MAGA influencer Emily Hart — an attractive young woman who espoused far-right talking points online — was revealed to be the creation of a 22-year-old Indian nursing student looking to make a quick buck from ideologues.
The student told Wired that he used Google’s Gemini AI to create the fictional influencer and raked in thousands off the “super dumb” — in his words — MAGA crowd who ate up the rhetoric.
But it’s not just so-called “super dumb” people falling for AI scams. Advice, especially online, has typically been aimed at older Americans who may be less fluent in technology and unaware of the red flags associated with fraud. However, the new FBI report suggests broader messaging may be needed to teach a much younger group of Americans how to keep criminals out of their wallets.
According to the FBI, teens have become a prime target for scammers in recent years. The bureau reports that it received 31,000 complaints to its crime complaint center from people under the age of 20 last year. That’s up 74 percent from 2024 and is nearly triple the number of complaints it received from the same demographic in 2015.
Ade Clewlow, associate director and senior adviser at cybersecurity consulting firm NCC Group, told the WSJ that teens who have grown up online are more likely to trust what they encounter on the internet and “are just as susceptible as anyone else” to fraud.
Social media sites are especially useful for scammers because they allow them to peer into a target’s network of friends and family and search for vulnerabilities they can exploit.
Focusing on a target’s family was exactly how scammers managed to steal more than $5,000 from Deborah Del Mastro of San Francisco.
Earlier this month, Del Mastro answered a phone call and received terrifying news; a voice on the other end of the call told her they had kidnapped her daughter, Sarah, and demanded a ransom.
She told Good Morning America that the voice told her there was “someone here that you need to talk to” before she heard her daughter’s panicked voice.
More details here...