AI Makes It Next to Impossible to Detect Scams. Now What?

Consumers and law enforcement face an unprecedented challenge as criminals master new technologies to cheat and steal

Sari Harrar,

AARP

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Published March 19, 2026

a lifeguard uses binoculars to look into the distance, symbolizing how difficult it can be to spot fraud. a keyboard spelling fraud replaces the beach.

Dan Bejar

Key takeaways

Criminals take advantage of easy-to-use, inexpensive AI tools to create convincing deepfake videos, cloned voices and messages to steal from victims.
Reports of AI-enabled scams have surged, with many older adults targeted by impostor schemes and other forms of fraud.
Experts urge slowing down, verifying independently, and carefully guarding personal information to protect yourself from rapidly evolving fraud tactics.

Last September, Dr. David Amron watched a Facebook video of himself with growing horror. A recognized specialist in lipedema surgery, he saw and heard himself hawking a $50 “miracle” cream for this painful, incurable condition in which fat accumulates under the skin.

But he had never made the video or endorsed the product. It was a deepfake scam, cooked up by criminals using artificial intelligence (AI). And it was so convincing that some of his own patients bought the cream.

“The video was disturbingly realistic,” says Amron, director of the Roxbury Institute in Beverly Hills, California. “My reaction was disbelief, anger and genuine concern for my patients. What unsettled me most was how authentic it appeared.”

Amron wasn’t the only one deepfaked; the video also featured Oprah Winfrey, Kelly Clarkson and the institute’s research director. Amron thinks criminals digitally altered legit online videos of his work, then used a photo of the researcher to create realistic audio and video. “This level of realism is exactly why these scams are so dangerous,” he says. “They are engineered to be believable, making it easy for vulnerable patients to trust them.”

More sophisticated AI-enabled scams

AI-enabled scams are skyrocketing, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warns. They include deepfake videos on social media and cloned voices on the phone as well as impostor websites and phishing emails and text messages. These increasingly sophisticated AI scams often put older adults in the crosshairs, according to a December 2025 Microsoft study of fraud data from AARP and the Better Business Bureau.

At risk: your money, your personal information and your health. “We’re getting deluged,” says Bob Sullivan, host of AARP’s The Perfect Scam podcast. “A couple of years ago, you might have encountered one or two AI-generated scams a year. Now scammer call centers are sending out tens of thousands of scam messages per minute.”

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Nearly 9 in 10 older adults said in a recent AARP poll that they’re worried about AI-enabled scams, according to the 2025 University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging.

For good reason: AI has transformed the business of fraud. Half of all spam emails are now generated with AI tools, according to a 2025 Columbia University study.

“AI doesn’t sleep,” says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and cofounder of the cybersecurity company Pindrop. “It’s cheap. It works 24/7.” And it works well. Criminals are deploying free or low-cost AI tools like ChatGPT and Sora — the same ones the rest of us use for web searches and to turn photos into fun videos — as well as underworld versions with names like FraudGPT, SpamGPT and Xanthorox. “AI is accelerating how scams are created and scaled,” says Teresa Hutson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Trusted Technology Group.

Deepfake videos, cloned voices and chatbots that can hold realistic conversations via text, email or phone are a snap to produce. “Eight years ago, it took 20 hours of recordings to clone someone’s voice for a scam,” says Balasubramaniyan. “Now, with a photo from LinkedIn and three seconds of your voice, a scammer can create a deepfake video with audio.”

Scammers like it so much, they’re replacing their employees at scammer call centers with AI systems, Balasubramaniyan discovered. His team had been eavesdropping on a West African scammer call center for years. In 2024, they stopped hearing the familiar voices of 12 call-center employees. AI-generated voices had taken over.

When researchers in Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab analyzed 531,000 fraud reports from AARP ’s Fraud Watch Network Helpline and the Better Business Bureau’s Scam Tracker, they found a disturbing trend: Scams that victims identified as AI-enabled — such as with realistic voices or videos — increased 20-fold from 2023 to 2025. The increase aligns with the arrival of AI, says Lisa Reppell, a report coauthor and senior program manager for information literacy at AI for Good.

AI chatbots turbocharge scams

Impostor scams — including faked calls, texts and emails purporting to be from government agencies, businesses, employers with job openings and package delivery services — are on the rise in the era of AI-enabled fraud. Half of all scams reported to AARP’s Helpline in 2025 were impostor schemes, the Microsoft report found. Most — 20,400 — were business and government scams, and just 700 were family impersonation scams. “Most impostors pose as businesses or officials, not people you know,” the report notes.

It’s a lucrative crime: Impostor scams involving fake unpaid bills and undelivered packages cost consumers $785 million in 2024, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. It’s getting harder to detect these fakes. “The old giveaways have changed,” says Hutson. “Bad grammar, poor spelling or clunky websites are less likely with AI.”

AI impostor scams take things to a new level, with computer-generated chatbots that act and sound like human beings — as Ron O'Brien discovered last year.

After a layoff in 2023, O’Brien, 65, a corporate communications executive from Boston’s North Shore, went back to school to learn more about AI in the workplace.

In May 2025 he got an unsolicited email about a $300,000-a-year work-at-home job with a Chicago medical device company. O’Brien applied — and entered an elaborate AI-powered job scam. “The company was real,” he says. “It turns out the job was not.”

Scammers set up a text interview via WhatsApp. “I realized I was chatting with a chatbot,” O’Brien says. “It was actually processing information I was providing and commenting on it, saying things like, ‘That’s interesting, Ron, tell me more.’ ” The criminals followed up with a 10-page job description, which O’Brien thinks was also created with AI tools. Then came a 30-minute phone interview. “The voice they generated matched the ethnicity of a real company employee,” he says. “I realized it was a bot. It was incredibly responsive. I kept looking for mistakes, but there were none.”

When the scammers quickly set up a video chat and offered him the job, O’Brien got suspicious. “Something was fishy,” he says. “Things like this don’t happen in three days.” During the call, he texted his wife that it looked like a scam — but mistakenly sent the message to the scammers. They hung up.

O’Brien suspects he would have had sensitive banking and other financial information stolen if he had continued the exchange.

a hand peels away a photo on a smartphone to show there is nothing but a i underneath

Dan Bejar

Social media's role in perpetuating AI-generated fraud

In October 2025, the Tech Transparency Project found that scam advertisers had paid Meta $49 million to run deepfake videos of politicians and government appointees — including President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — hawking scams, including fake government stimulus checks and benefit cards on Facebook and Instagram.

The deepfakes also promoted questionable investments, free merchandise that signed people up for expensive hidden subscriptions, and fake Medicare payments.

Katie A. Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, says social media is awash in deepfake scams. And the problem persists. “While Meta rakes in advertising profits, it’s letting deepfake scams target [older people] and their bank accounts,” she says.

Since the report, she adds, “not only have we seen new advertisers from the same scam networks but also new pages running identical ads. One-third of the entire planet, 3 billion people, are on Facebook. No platform has the same kind of reach.”

Paul notes that deepfakes use several methods to pull consumers in. “If you pause too long or click on one, the platform sends you more and more,” she says. “Some tell you, with a sense of urgency, to call. They know older Americans will be wary of typing in their personal information online but may have more trust on the phone.”

In November, two U.S. senators asked the federal government to investigate scams on Facebook and Instagram; Meta countered by saying it has reduced scams significantly, according to a Reuters news service story.

Amron, the lipedema surgeon, says it took months to get the deepfake video taken down despite posting warnings on social media and appearing on the Today show. “These scams don’t just take money,” he says. “They derail patients from the care they need. Approach any online medical advertisement with caution. Deepfake videos can look completely real, even to trained professionals.”

Protecting yourself

Stick with proven strategies to avoid scams: Pause and reflect before acting. And be skeptical: “You can’t trust anymore with your eyes and ears,” says Balasubramaniyan. “You have to verify. The big thing is to slow down and evaluate the situation.”

More tips:

Don’t trust your caller ID. If you get a call from a business, hang up and find the company’s number (for a bank, it will be on your financial statement, for example), then call directly. No matter what the pitch, anyone asking you to pay with a gift card is a scammer, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The same goes for requests to pay using crypto kiosks.

Pause before you click. Never click on a link in an email or text message without confirming that it’s from a legitimate source. Criminals can craft extremely sophisticated-looking messages, as well as fake websites that convincingly mimic real ones.

Consider choosing a safe word for your family. Share it only with family members or others in your inner circle. If someone calls claiming to be a grandchild, for example, you can ask for the safe word or words — rubber ducky, Fred Flintstone, whatever — and if the caller doesn’t know it, it’s clearly a scam.

Guard your personal information. To avoid identity theft, be careful about disclosing your full name, your home address, your Social Security number, credit card and banking information, and other personal details. Definitely don’t share information with someone you know only from email or texting.

Report scams. If you spot a scam or you’ve been a victim of one, report it to the police, as well as the FBI at IC3.gov. The more information authorities have, the better they can identify patterns, link cases and ultimately catch the criminals. (Find out more about how and why to report scams.)

You can also report scams to the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline, 877-908-3360. It’s a free resource, with trained fraud specialists who can provide support and guidance on what to do next and how to avoid scams.

The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.

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