AI voice cloning and deepfakes used in financial fraud targeting US consumers
Scammers are using AI-generated voice clones and deepfake videos to conduct fraud against US consumers. According to FBI data, Americans reported over 22,000 AI-related fraud cases with approximately $893 million in losses in 2025, with adults over 60 accounting for $352 million of those losses.
What happened
Scammers are using AI to clone voices and create deepfake videos to commit financial fraud. In one case, a finance employee at architecture and design firm Arup was deceived into wiring approximately $25 million to fraudsters after they set up a video meeting with deepfakes impersonating the chief financial officer and colleagues.
According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center 2025 annual report, voice cloning requires only a few seconds of audio and cheap consumer tools, with listeners able to identify AI-generated voices only about 60% of the time. Language models are also being used to write personalized phishing emails at scale using details scraped from social media.
Reported impact
Americans filed more than 22,000 AI-related fraud cases and reported approximately $893 million in losses, with investment fraud accounting for $632 million and people over 60 accounting for $352 million of losses. The consulting firm Deloitte projects that actual AI fraud losses will push U.S. fraud losses overall to $40 billion by 2027, up from $12.3 billion in 2023.
The cyber insurer Resilience reported that more than 85% of losses in its claims portfolio in the first half of 2026 stemmed from attacks aimed at people rather than systems.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.