Top Scams of 2025. Be Aware In The New Year!

In 2025, Americans alone lost $20.9 billion to online scams — the highest annual total ever recorded by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in its 25-year history. Globally, scam losses hit an estimated $1 trillion. These are not crimes happening to other people in other places. They are happening at scale, across every demographic, in every country, and the tools being used to perpetrate them have become dramatically more sophisticated in the last two years.

The reason is artificial intelligence. The scams themselves are not new — fraud, impersonation, investment schemes, and romance deception have existed for as long as human communication has. What AI has done is remove the limitations that made these scams detectable. The poorly written email. The unfamiliar voice. The blurry profile photo. The obvious implausibility of the scenario. All of these tells have been eliminated or dramatically reduced. What is left is fraud that is, in many cases, indistinguishable from the real thing — until it is too late.

A scammer needs three seconds of audio to clone a voice with an 85 percent match. Three seconds. That is less than a typical greeting in a video someone has posted online. A voicemail. A clip in a social media story. The technology to do this is commercially available, costs almost nothing, and requires no technical expertise to operate.

The result is the family emergency scam — one of the most emotionally devastating forms of fraud currently operating. You receive a call from your child, your grandchild, your parent. The voice is unmistakably theirs. They are in trouble — a car accident, an arrest, a medical emergency. They need money immediately. They ask you not to tell anyone else yet. The urgency is real. The voice is real. The crisis is not.

In July 2025, Sharon Brightwell of Dover, Florida lost $15,000 after receiving a call using AI to clone her daughter’s voice. A grandmother in another documented case rushed to her bank and withdrew the maximum cash she could access before discovering the call had been fabricated. The FBI received nearly 48,000 phishing complaints from adults over 60 in 2025 alone — nearly double the previous year. Older adults reported $7.7 billion in losses in 2025, an average of over $38,000 per victim.

One in four adults has already experienced an AI voice scam. The defense is a family code word — a word or phrase agreed in advance that a real family member in a real emergency would know to say. If the caller does not know the word, the call is not real.

The name comes from the Chinese phrase for fattening a pig before slaughter. It is an accurate description of what happens.

A stranger contacts you — on a dating app, through social media, via a text that appears to have been sent to the wrong number. They are attractive, successful, interesting. They take time. They are not in a hurry. Over days and weeks they build what feels like a genuine relationship — conversation, emotional investment, the gradual development of trust. At some point they mention an investment opportunity. Cryptocurrency, usually. They have made significant money from it. They want to share it with you.

You invest a small amount. It appears to grow. You invest more. It grows more. You can see your balance on the platform. What you cannot see is that the platform is fake, the balance is fabricated, and the person you have been speaking to is a professional fraudster — in many cases themselves a trafficking victim, held in a scam compound in Southeast Asia and forced to run these operations under threat of violence.

When you attempt to withdraw, you are told there is a tax, a fee, a verification requirement. You pay it. There is another. Eventually the platform vanishes. The person vanishes. The money is gone.

Pig butchering extracted at least $75 billion from victims globally between 2020 and 2024. In 2025, the FBI reported $7.2 billion in cryptocurrency investment fraud losses in the United States alone — a 48 percent increase from the previous year. In October 2025, the US Department of Justice filed its largest-ever forfeiture action, seizing approximately $15 billion in Bitcoin linked to pig butchering operations. The money was already gone from the victims who lost it.

In February 2024, a finance employee at Arup — a major British engineering firm — participated in what he believed was a video conference with his company’s CFO and several colleagues. Everyone on the call looked right, sounded right, and behaved exactly as expected. He was instructed to transfer funds. He transferred $25 million. Every person on the call was a deepfake. Not one of them was real.

Deepfake video scams have moved from theoretical concern to documented operational reality. They are used in business email compromise — where executives are impersonated to authorize fraudulent transfers. They are used in romance scams — where victims who demand a video call to verify they are speaking to a real person are shown a generated face that reacts, smiles, and responds in real time. They are used in celebrity endorsement scams — where fabricated videos of known figures promote fraudulent investment schemes across social media.

Deepfake files jumped from 500,000 in 2023 to 8 million in 2025. Reports of AI-enabled scams increased 456 percent between mid-2024 and mid-2025. The CEO of WPP, one of the world’s largest advertising companies, was targeted by scammers who cloned his voice and used it in a fake video call to attempt to extract sensitive credentials from his employees.

Online job scams rose 19 percent in the first half of 2025 and now appear on legitimate platforms including LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter — making them significantly harder to identify than fraudulent listings on obscure job boards.

The mechanics are consistent: an offer arrives for a remote position, well-paid, requiring minimal experience. The interview is conducted via video call — sometimes with an AI avatar using a cloned voice. Scammer profiles use AI-generated professional headshots that are nearly impossible to distinguish from real photographs.

Once engaged, victims are asked to complete forms with personal information including Social Security numbers — enabling identity theft. Or they are asked to purchase equipment using a company cheque that subsequently bounces. Or they are charged for training, background checks, or onboarding that never materializes. A newer variant — task scams — asks victims to complete simple assignments such as liking social media posts in exchange for small payments, with the early payments being genuine to build trust before larger amounts are requested and stolen. FTC data shows job scam losses grew from $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024.

Among the most cynical scams currently operating is the recovery scam — which specifically targets people who have already been defrauded.

After losing money to a pig butchering scheme, an investment fraud, or a romance scam, victims are contacted by someone claiming to be a specialist in recovering stolen cryptocurrency or a lawyer with access to freeze the funds. They know the victim’s specific loss amount — scammers share victim data, or the information is available from public filings. The credibility this creates is enough to persuade someone already desperate to recover what they lost to pay an upfront retainer or legal fee. The recovery specialist and the fee disappear. The victim has been defrauded twice.

The FBI seized fraudulent recovery scam websites in 2024 specifically because the problem had become significant enough to warrant targeted action. If anyone contacts you offering to recover money you have lost to a scam, treat it as a scam.

Every scam described above exploits the same vulnerabilities — trust, urgency, emotional investment, and the assumption that what you are seeing and hearing is real. The defenses are consistent across all of them.

Slow down. Every scam creates urgency. Urgency is the mechanism that bypasses critical thinking. When anything financial is requested urgently — regardless of who is asking, regardless of how it looks or sounds — slow down deliberately. A real emergency can wait five minutes for you to verify independently.

Verify through a separate channel. If someone calls you claiming to be a family member, your bank, your employer, or a government agency — hang up and call back using a number you already have. Not a number they provide. Your bank’s number on the back of your card. Your family member’s number from your contacts. Verification through the same channel as the request is not verification.

Establish a family code word. Choose a word that only your immediate family knows. Anyone claiming to be a family member in an emergency who cannot provide the code word should be treated with immediate suspicion.

Never invest based on a relationship that began online. If someone you met online — regardless of how long you have known them or how genuine the relationship feels — introduces an investment opportunity, treat it as a pig butchering attempt until you have verified the platform independently through sources that have no connection to them.

Report scams even if you feel embarrassed. Scams are sophisticated operations designed by professionals to exploit normal human responses to trust and urgency. Being targeted is not a failure of intelligence. Not reporting means fewer data points for law enforcement, fewer warnings for potential future victims, and a lower chance of any recovery.

The scammers have AI. They have professional scripts, organized operations, and the advantage of surprise. Your only defense is process — a set of consistent habits that apply before you act, regardless of how convincing the situation appears. Process is not paranoia. It is the appropriate response to a $1 trillion annual problem.

The voice that sounds like your daughter may not be your daughter. The person who has spent three months building your trust may be sitting in a compound in Myanmar. The CFO on the video call may not exist. Verify everything. Trust the process, not the presentation.