MATTHIAS BALK|PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES
An older woman uses a phone.
Internet crime is big business. In 2025, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center tallied more than a million complaints covering losses of nearly $21 billion. Operations that spread across continents are constantly evolving and are using artificial intelligence to get more sophisticated.
To prepare you for the inevitable attempts to make off with your money, we sat down with Supervisory Special Agent Timothy Lynch, unit chief of the FBI’s Cyber-Enabled Fraud and Money Laundering Unit.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Decision Points: What is the most common kind of scam that you see, and how does it work?
Lynch: The most common scam right now would be cryptocurrency investment fraud, where people receive cold calls and emails asking them to make some kind of investment in cryptocurrency, where there are claims that are going to be incredible returns on investment. In actuality, the scammers are just taking their funds wholesale. It is by far the most common. It has the highest loss amount. We had about $7.2 billion in reported losses last year.
Why am I getting so many obviously scammy text messages?
Because scam has become global in nature and industrial in scale.
Over the last 10 years or so, we've seen an incredible rise of what are actually known as scam compounds. These are anywhere from 100- to 500-acre mini cities, typically based in Southeast Asia and now Africa. What they're doing is they are buying up cell phone information in bulk, and they are sending out a lot of these cold call solicitations, trying to victimize people.
How has AI changed the scam game?
It hasn't really changed the schemes. It has just made the schemes more smooth, more efficient and more believable. And the example I always give is, the first time I got my Nigerian prince email, there were just enough grammatical errors, spelling errors to arouse suspicion. Just using a simple publicly available AI chat platform, scammers are now able to smooth that language out.
We have a video that we received from our office in Ghana involving Nigerian scammers who were on a FaceTime call with an intended victim of a romance fraud scheme. You had a Nigerian scammer speaking in his Nigerian accent on a real-time FaceTime call with this intended victim who was out in the Midwest. And by using AI, he was able to alter his face and his voice to appear as a white American male.
So if you're on the call, there is nothing to arouse suspicion.
What's the most creative scam you've seen?
The Grandparent Scam. This is another example of how AI has changed the game. So typically, it used to be that a scammer would call a grandparent and would pose as their grandson or granddaughter and say, “I'm in Mexico or some foreign country. I've been arrested. I need money to get me out.”
When we've interviewed people for these scams in the past, they would say, "I did it, but the person I spoke to sounded nothing like my grandchild.”
Now, scammers are able to find people online, and all they need is a snippet of video or audio, and they're able to use AI to realistically pose as that grandchild, and then make a more effective solicitation to the grandparents.
You're at Thanksgiving dinner, and a relative asks you for advice about how to avoid getting conned. What kind of steps do you recommend?
We have a campaign right now called Take a Beat. It is designed to get intended victims – anytime they're presented with one of these schemes – to just take a moment and evaluate what they're being asked to do and take logical steps to follow up on however they've been contacted to determine if it's legitimate.
The most common way people are contacted is phishing, which is just receiving unsolicited texts, emails, phone calls, things like that. And there's always some kind of exigent circumstance built into it. The most common one right now might be getting a text that appears to come from your bank, where someone will say, “There's been an unauthorized attempt on your account. Please click on this link or call this number in order to rectify your account.”
As part of our Take a Beat campaign, what I always recommend people do is what we call Check, Call, Wait. So if you receive any type of unsolicited contact, you should check the number, check the email address to determine if it's someone you had contact with before. If not, your guard should be up.
If you receive a call from a phone number claiming to be your bank, what you should do is check to see if that is a legitimate phone number connected to your bank. The next step you should take is you should call a known individual or a known number. If you get a call from or a text from your bank saying, “Hey, call us about this unauthorized transaction,” do not respond to that text or call.
Get out your banking card, look at the number on the back of that card, call that number, and they'll tell you whether or not that contact was legitimate. The last step is wait. Don't do anything until you are absolutely sure you are sending money to a legitimate location for a legitimate purpose.
A lot of people don't want to report being scammed out of shame. But there are three specific steps they should take if they've been scammed. First and foremost is to file a fraud report with their bank and request the indemnification process, which means the bank, if there are funds that can be recouped, they will reach out to the receiving bank and see if they can do that.
Second, they should file a report with IC3.gov and specifically identify the victimized account and the beneficiary account. If those funds have gone out within seven to 10 days, we have something called the financial fraud kill chain, where IC3 independently will see if they can recoup those funds.
And third, if they need additional assistance, they can reach out to their local FBI office, and we can determine if additional follow-up can be done.
No comments:
Post a Comment