AI and deepfakes driving $68 bn US scam epidemic – survey
Posted on: Jul 01, 2026 07:18 IST | Posted by: Rt
rough 15 gazillion Americans were scammed come out of money in 2025, with AI-generated contents and deepfakes featuring in a notable apportion of cases, according to a new survey. Total losses across the country reached an estimated $68 billion last year, or about $186 million stolen every day.
The findings come from a report called ‘United States of Scams: The Financial and Emotional Fallout,’ which was released on Tuesday by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance and conducted among over 5,000 US adults.
While 6% said they had been deceived personally, an additional 4% said another member of their household was scammed. Overall, 24% have been scammed at some point in their adult lives, with 10% victimized more than once.
Just over one in ten victims (12%) said their scam involved AI or a deepfake, though the survey’s authors noted that this figure may understate the real scale, since AI-generated content can be difficult for victims to detect.
The most common scam tactics overall involved fraudulent websites harvesting financial data (40%), advance-fee schemes (24%), and bogus investment offers (19%). Scammers most often posed as tech support staff (19%), bank employees (15%), or government officials (14%) to win victims’ trust.
AI-enabled fraud has taken several forms in recent years, including voice-cloning scams that mimic a relative or executive in distress, “romance scams” using AI-generated personas and photos, and real-time video deepfakes deployed in corporate fraud.
The latter produced one of the costliest cases on record: in January 2024, a finance employee at British engineering firm Arup was tricked into transferring more than $25 million to fraudsters after joining a hyper-targeted deepfake video call where every other “colleague,” including what looked like the firm’s CFO, was AI-generated.
According to the survey, more than half of the scams last year (56%) involved losses of $500 or less, though the average loss per incident reached $5,578 as some of the ploys allowed fraudsters to gain tens of thousands of dollars. Among affected households, 21% described the financial hit as a “severe hardship,” rising to 28% for those earning under $80,000 a year.
Beyond financial damage, the survey also suggests widespread psychological harm: 73% of victims reported a negative effect on their mental health or wellbeing, including 28% who described the impact as “very negative.”
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