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Rise of sophisticated AI-driven deepfake impersonation scams

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2026-08-24 03:51 UTC → 2026-08-25 00:52 UTC · added ~~removed~~

Cybersecurity authorities are warning of evolving deepfake scams that use artificial intelligence to impersonate trusted individuals. In India, SEBI has warned of the ‘Boss Scam,’ where fraudsters use AI-generated video and voice cloning to impersonate executives. Similarly, the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) has issued warnings regarding criminals cloning the voices and images of relatives or colleagues. In Europe, these crimes are estimated to cause losses of approximately 8,000 euros per minute. Newer tactics include AI-powered phone scams, such as ‘SocialNext’ using an AI digital assistant to impersonate social media customer service. In Australia, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) reported a 182 per cent increase in scams removed in FY26, noting that ‘AI is making investment scams more convincing and harder to detect.’ Investment scams emerged as the largest fraud-loss category in both Australia and the United States in 2025, with losses reaching $837.7 million and $7.9 billion, respectively. Fraudsters are utilizing deepfake advertisements that impersonate financial professionals to direct users to coordinated WhatsApp groups. Furthermore, AI chatbots are proving highly effective in ‘pig butchering’ scams—long-term schemes designed to build emotional trust. Recent developments show scammers are increasingly scraping personal data from social media and data breaches to build highly personalized scripts. In ~~the United States, a victim in North Carolina lost nearly $6,000 after a caller used spoofed caller ID to impersonate a credit union representative. In~~ Vietnam, experts warn that criminals are leveraging AI and big data to impersonate influential figures and are reportedly developing tools to bypass biometric authentication used in online payments. In the cryptocurrency sector, blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reports that 2026 losses from deepfake scams have already exceeded the previous year’s total by 263%. TRM Labs’ AI-in-Crime Adoption Index identifies scams as the only category of crypto-crime where AI has reached a “Mature” level of adoption, with AI-related reports rising approximately 13-fold since 2022.

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