The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warns that Americans lost just under $900 million to AI-powered scams in 2025, Malwarebytes reports. Total reported losses to scams last year reached nearly $21 billion, a 26% increase from 2024. The researchers note that the true losses are likely much higher, since many attacks go unreported.

“The main drivers behind the rise in AI-powered scams are voice cloning, deepfake images and videos, and AI‑generated scripts,” Malwarebytes says. “These tools have supercharged classic fraud schemes such as romance scams, kidnapping and extortion calls, fake influencers, and government impersonation.”

The FBI notes that AI tools have drastically lowered the bar for attackers to craft highly realistic fraudulent content.

“AI technology enables the creation of convincing synthetic content, such as social media profiles and personalized conversations, often in mass quantities,” the Bureau says. “People have manipulated video and audio similarly for decades, but the widespread availability of this developing technology makes it possible to create high-quality content. AI-enabled synthetic content is becoming increasingly difficult to detect and easier to make, which allows criminal actors to potentially conduct successful fraud schemes against individuals, businesses, and financial institutions.”

Malwarebytes concludes that these attacks will increase as AI tools improve and become more accessible.

“The FBI and financial institutions recommend verifying identities via official contact channels,” Malwarebytes says. “One of their biggest concerns is government impersonation scams, which have evolved from crude IRS gift‑card phone calls into sophisticated, multi‑channel operations that combine spoofed caller ID, stolen agency logos, and AI‑generated audio and video of public officials. This report, and others like it, shows how AI is being weaponized to automate research on victims, generate convincing scripts, and create highly believable deepfake personas at scale. AI is also increasingly used in business email compromise (BEC), romance scams, and impersonation fraud. In BEC cases involving AI, losses have already reached tens of millions of dollars for businesses alone.”

Malwarebytes has the story: Americans lost nearly $900 million to AI-powered scams, FBI says