12% of successful scams in 2025 used AI or deepfakes, according to poll of U.S. adults

As AI is adopted across industries, it’s also being taken up by scammers. Around 6% of U.S. adults, or around 15 million people, were scammed out of money last year, a new Gallup and Stop Scams Alliance survey finds, and victims reported that 12% of those scams involved AI or deepfakes.

“These guys aren’t called organized crime for nothing. They’re actually organized, and they’re using their organization to start attacking us with scale now to a tune of $68 billion, which is like the annual revenues of Delta Airlines. It’s like a Fortune 500 company. It’s huge,” Stop Scams Alliance founder and CEO Ken Westbrook told NBC News. The Stop Scams Alliance is a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce scams in the U.S.

The survey of 5,173 U.S. adult respondents in January through February, which relied on participants’ self-reporting their scam experiences, said that “the use of AI may be difficult to detect by scam victims.”

But Westbrook noted that the results align with other signs of the burgeoning issue of AI-fueled scams.

In March, Interpol warned that AI could enhance and fuel fraud. “Enabled by artificial intelligence, low-cost digital tools and increased global criminal collaboration, we are witnessing the industrialization of fraud,” Secretary General Valdecy Urquiza said.

AI companies, including OpenAI, have periodically also released reports documenting the use of their platforms by scammers. In February, OpenAI released a report documenting attempts to use its technologies to commit fraud and scams around the world, including one instance targeting people who were already victims of scams with faked advertisements for “scam recovery” services.

In total, the Gallup and Stop Scams Alliance survey found that Americans lost $68 billion to scams last year.

The survey helps fill in a picture of the scale of scamming in the U.S., Westbrook said.

The U.S. does not actively regularly collect information from residents about scamming, though the Federal Trade Commission publishes complaint data it receives yearly. Respondents in the Gallup survey reported losing nearly four times as much as the losses that were reported to the FTC.

The survey included respondents who did not formally report the scams to an authority, which partially explains the nearly $52 billion data difference, Westbrook said.

The data reporting gap is “one of the reasons why we’re not devoting sufficient resources to this problem. It’s just that we haven’t measured it properly,” Westbrook said.

The governments of the United Kingdom and Australia conduct annual surveys of scam prevalence, but the U.S. has not regularly measured it.

“The government can’t even tell you what the percentage of people in the United States being scammed is. That’s because they just get victim reports, but they don’t know how much is unreported. So that’s the gap that we’re able to fill in with the Gallup survey,” Westbrook said.

The survey also found that 1 in 4 Americans say they’ve been personally scammed at some point in their adult lives.

The scams brought about severe financial hardship for 21% of respondents and moderate financial hardship for 46%, according to the survey. The report also found higher scam rates among lower-income adults, people of color and people without bachelor’s degrees.

Scammers used sophisticated research and impersonation techniques to fool their victims.

A woman told Gallup that scammers contacted her after she posted about her two missing cats online. The scammers portrayed themselves as the sheriff’s department and transferred her to somebody who said they worked in the emergency vet clinic and claimed they had her cat and needed around $780 for emergency surgery.

“It sounded like it was 100% legitimate. … I was waiting and waiting, and my husband … he called the [City] Police Department, talked to them, and they are the ones who told him, no, your wife was scammed,” she said.

Seventy-five percent of respondents reported that being scammed had negative impacts on their mental health and well-being.

“There’s a line in the Gallup report that hit me like a hammer when I read it. It says that ‘the emotional impact of scams can be more injurious than the financial impact,’ and I certainly saw that with my mom,” Westbrook said. His mother was scammed in spring 2023, which started when she searched for her sister’s obituary online but clicked on a fake page set up by scammers, who eventually robbed her of her life savings.

Fraudulent websites are among the most prevalent scams, 40% of respondents reported in the survey. Phone, text and email were each involved in nearly half of all scams, with 50% of scams involving two or more methods.

In nearly half of all scams, 49% of the victims were also deceived into personally sending money to the scammers. Payment apps like Zelle and PayPal were the most commonly used methods, the survey found.

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