The Hague, Netherlands--(Newsfile Corp. - September 16, 2026) - ScamInfo.ai, a fraud-awareness and scam-verification resource, today published a cross-source analysis of 2025-26 global fraud data, synthesizing reports from the FBI, FTC, UK Finance, Australia's National Anti-Scam Centre, the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), Chainalysis, and Gen Digital. The analysis finds that scammers have shifted their primary point of contact away from phone calls and email and into messaging apps and social platforms with direct-message capability, a pattern that shows up independently in nearly every major national dataset, while artificial intelligence tools are making individual scams cheaper to produce and harder to spot.

"Every agency we looked at is measuring something slightly different, different countries, different definitions, different reporting windows, but they all land on the same two findings," said Julia Blokhina, COO at ScamInfo.ai. "Scams have moved into the same apps people use to talk to friends and family, and AI is now doing measurable work inside fraud operations, not just showing up in warnings about the future. Once you see that pattern repeat across five unrelated agencies, it stops looking like a coincidence."

Scam Losses Hit Record Highs Across Nearly Every Major Economy

The study notes how global losses to scams reached an estimated $442 billion in 2025, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance's Global State of Scams 2025 report, based on a survey of 46,000 adults across 42 countries. In the United States, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged $20.877 billion in losses for 2025, up 26% year over year and the first time IC3 has logged more than one million complaints in a single year. The FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network separately tracked $15.9 billion in reported US fraud losses. The UK recorded £1.28 billion in payment fraud losses for 2025, its second consecutive year of growth.

Australia is the one exception in the dataset worth noting: the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reported $2.18 billion AUD in losses for 2025, up 7.8% year over year but still nearly 30% below the country's 2022 peak, evidence that sustained bank, telecom, and platform intervention can bend a fraud trend downward rather than simply slow its growth.

The Clearest Cross-Source Finding: Fraud Has Moved Into Messaging and Social Apps

The single most consistent pattern across every report ScamInfo.ai reviewed is a shift in contact channel. GASA's global survey found that 84% of scam attempts occurred on platforms with direct-message capability, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Gmail. In the US, the share of scam victims who said contact began via text or messaging app rose from 20% to 30% year over year, and for Gen Z specifically it jumped from 13% to 40%. UK Finance reports that two-thirds of authorised push payment fraud, the category covering bank transfer scams, now originates online rather than by phone.

"Cold calls and spam emails have well-known warning signs by now," Blokhina said. "A message from what looks like a friend, a dating match, or a seller in a marketplace listing doesn't carry that same built-in suspicion, and that's exactly where scammers have concentrated their effort."

Investment and Crypto-Linked Fraud Remains the Costliest Category Everywhere It's Measured

While shopping and purchase scams generate the highest volume of reports in the UK and elsewhere, investment and crypto-linked fraud is the largest category by dollars lost in every dataset analyzed. The FTC put investment scam losses at $7.9 billion in 2025; the FBI attributes roughly 49% of all scam-related losses to investment fraud; UK Finance's largest single fraud category by value is investment scams at £221.5 million, up 40% year over year. Chainalysis's 2026 Crypto Crime Report attributes at least $14 billion in on-chain crypto scam losses to 2025, with "pig butchering" romance-investment schemes responsible for $2.1 billion in the first half of the year alone.

A substantial share of these losses trace back to organized, forced-labor scam compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, where the United Nations estimates more than 300,000 people are held and made to run scam operations under threat of violence. US enforcement action intensified in 2026: a multi-agency strike force sanctioned roughly 20 companies and individuals tied to these compounds in April and has seized more than $578 million in cryptocurrency in its first three months.

AI Is Now Measurable Inside Fraud Data, Not Just a Future Risk

For the first time, several of the reports reviewed quantify AI's role in fraud with hard numbers rather than warnings. Vishing attacks using AI-cloned voices rose 1,633% in the first quarter of 2025. AI-enabled scams broadly were up 1,210% across the year. The FTC recorded a 1,200% increase in deepfake-related complaints between 2023 and 2025, and roughly a quarter of adults now say they've personally experienced an AI voice scam.

ScamInfo.ai's analysis is careful to size this accurately rather than overstate it: the FBI's IC3 tracked AI-related crime as its own category for the first time in 2025, logging $893 million in losses, real money, but still a small fraction of IC3's total $20.9 billion. "The honest read is that AI's dollar footprint in reported fraud is still modest relative to the total," Blokhina said, "but its growth rate, and what it's doing to how convincing individual scams look and sound, is the part worth watching closely in 2026."

What Consumers Should Do

ScamInfo.ai recommends treating unsolicited direct messages, on any platform, with the same skepticism given to a cold call, especially requests to move a conversation off-platform to an app like WhatsApp or Telegram. Any urgent voice message asking for money, even one that sounds like a known family member, should be verified through a second channel before acting.

Methodology

This analysis synthesizes publicly available data from eight primary sources: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2025 Annual Report, the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network, UK Finance's Annual Fraud Report 2026, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Targeting Scams Report 2025, the Global Anti-Scam Alliance's Global State of Scams 2025 report (with Feedzai), Chainalysis's 2026 Crypto Crime Report, Gen Digital's H1 2026 Threat Report, and supporting consumer-survey data from Citizens Advice and Experian UK. All figures are the most recently published full-year or half-year data available from each source as of September 2026. Full citations and links to each original source are available in the companion analysis, The State of Scams in 2026, on ScamInfo.ai.

About ScamInfo.ai

ScamInfo.ai is a fraud-awareness resource that helps consumers identify and avoid scams before losing money, offering a free platform validator, a database of known scam and trading-platform domains, and a knowledge base of scam-type breakdowns and fraud-recovery guidance drawn from primary law-enforcement, regulatory, and industry data.

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