Pamela, a 63-year-old New Englander, joined an online dating platform after her daughter suggested she might meet someone to bring to her wedding the following year. After a couple months, Pamela found a message from a wholesome-looking man who said all the right things.

The relationship blossomed, moving to late-night Google chats, text, and video. Thomas claimed he was a high-ranking U.S. Army official on one last tour before retirement, serving on a dangerous mission in Syria. When she asked for proof of identification, he sent a copy of his passport, and his accounts of danger on the ground were reinforced by news reports.

The requests came slowly, initially for supplies or gifts, followed by a series of loans. Over the four-month relationship, she transferred about $150,000 through PayPal, wire transfers, and cryptocurrencies. Authorities were able to recoup about $35,000.

The rapid rise and sophistication of artificial intelligence has turbocharged decades-old scams, putting an increasing number of savers and investors at risk. Scammers use AI to identify targets, make pitches more plausible, and execute them faster and at a larger scale than ever. "It is an industrial revolution for fraud criminals," says Kathy Stokes, senior director of AARP's fraud prevention programs.

Emotional Toll

For Pamela, it was more than a financial hit that cleaned out her retirement savings and forced her to take a second job. It was also the emotional loss of a relationship she thought was real. "Going to the authorities was one of the hardest days of my life," she says. "It was humiliating and heartbreaking, and I now have the lingering effects of taking credit cards out to get access to cash. Everything is maxed out and my credit history is blown to pieces." She asked not to use her last name because she doesn't want colleagues to know and hasn't even told her family the extent of the scam.

Fewer than 5% of scams are reported to a government entity or Better Business Bureau, according to studies cited last year in a report by the Federal Trade Commission. Accounting for underreporting, the FTC estimates $196 billion was lost to fraud in 2025-$82 billion of that among those over age 60. Based on reported cases by adults over 60, the FTC says losses surged to $2.4 billion in 2024 from $600 million in 2020.

The FBI included a section on artificial intelligence this year in a report for the first time, noting that nearly $893 million of the fraud complaints received in 2025 involved AI. Typical scams involved fake social profiles, voice clones, identification documents, and videos impersonating public figures.

AI bots can scrape data culled from data breaches off the dark web and combine that with nuggets from social media and lead lists from other criminals. AI also facilitates the spoofing of phone numbers and websites. It can take a snippet of video and clone a loved one's voice or create Deepfake videos to impersonate anyone from celebrities and government officials to potential suitors.

AI has done away with former telltale signs like grammatical errors in emails, accents on calls, or the lack of video in romance scams. Swindlers have also found workarounds to some of the advice offered to sidestep scams, like hanging up and finding a number themselves. They can also pay search engines to make their spoofed websites pop up before legitimate sites.

"The due diligence people used to do in the past isn't adequate for AI-supported fraud," says Brady Finta, a career FBI agent who headed the San Diego elder justice task force and now heads the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center. Despite regular warnings about scams and tips, Finta says his own parents were hit by scams. "Everyone needs to think of themselves as a potential victim," he says.

Mary Ellen Strange had heeded some of the standard advice, but the 77-year-old still lost close to $398,000 in a scam that played out over seven weeks in the summer of 2024. Strange, a retired IT consultant from Indiana, typically didn't answer calls from unknown numbers but she was preoccupied as her dog was barking aggressively at her carpet cleaners. When the caller mentioned a MacBook Pro purchase and money laundering, Strange hung up.

Later, she worried someone might have breached her Amazon.com account. She searched online for Amazon Fraud Detection and dialed the number, only to find the person repeating the earlier information on the MacBook and money laundering and telling her she could also face child-pornography charges.

She was then transferred to someone impersonating the Federal Trade Commission, who said she was likely a victim of identity theft and had two options: They could press charges and lock her financial accounts until she was cleared, or she could work with the government, meeting with federal officers who would issue a new Social Security card and ID, provide a certified check for the money held in her accounts and a "no-objection" letter clearing her of charges. She said they also demanded "absolute confidentiality."

For weeks, scammers threatened Strange with locking her money down if she didn't cooperate. They stayed on the phone with her for hours with detailed directions to drive to neighboring towns and use Bitcoin ATMs and find places to buy gold coins and bars she would eventually drop into the back of cars supposedly driven by federal agents. They also gave her instructions on what to say if anyone pushed back, including how to lie to her financial advisor.

Strange had doubts, but the scammers reminded her she had called them. "That was always in the back of my mind-I had reached out to them," says Strange.

Lucrative Targets

More than 11,000 Americans are turning 65 each day; longer lives bring higher risks of cognitive decline and loneliness, and those with sizable assets are prime targets. "There is an estimated $124 trillion in assets that is supposed to transition from older to younger generations through 2048," says Rachel Cartwright, assistant special agent in charge at the FBI, adding that overseas swindlers are drawn to the opportunity. "These swindlers heavily research victims: Do they have a lot of assets, what are their hobbies, how can they become easily groomed into the fraud?"

At the same time, AI companies are rapidly unveiling more advanced tools. A wave of deregulation has seen the Trump administration defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission have disbanded crypto enforcement units, even as crypto has played a central role in many recent scams.

"Crypto presents its own challenges in terms of enforcement and asset recovery," David Woodcock, the SEC's head of enforcement, told Barron's. "But we're not ignoring crypto, and some of the cases we've brought recently highlight that fraud is fraud and we're going to go after it no matter what."

Elder fraud experts like Finta say there is no coordinated governmentwide response to what is quickly morphing into a significant problem. While more than a dozen agencies have scam-related efforts, they work independently, with none serving to coordinate the efforts.

Generative artificial intelligence, which creates fresh content based on patterns it gleans from data, is expected to exacerbate the problem-a reason some are sounding a larger call to action. "It's impossible to expect people to be able to constantly dodge these through their lives, but it is where we are right now," says Ben Winters, director of AI and data privacy at the Consumer Federation of America.

There is growing recognition of the problem in Congress, with Senators at a July hearing on AI and scams sharing their own families' brushes with swindlers. Several bills are in the mix, including the National Strategy for Combating Scams Act, a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) that would require the FBI to build a coordinated national strategy to confront the rising losses, with input from businesses, victims, and law enforcement. Senators Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) and Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) earlier this year introduced the Safeguarding Consumers from Advertising Misconduct, or SCAM, Act that goes after fraudulent and deceptive commercial advertisements on social media and online platforms.

A Familiar Voice

For now, Americans are left trying to discern what is real or fake. While eating breakfast with her husband, Deborah Del Mastro, a retired actress and musician, answered a local call, assuming it was a prospective client. Instead, a menacing voice told Del Mastro her adult daughter had witnessed a major drug deal and would be sold to traffickers unless she came up with $20,000. Less than a minute into the call, the scammer put what sounded like her daughter on the phone having a panic attack. "I've heard it so many times and I was like holy crap this is real and I need to do exactly what he says," says Del Mastro.

She was instructed to tell no one, stay on the phone, and bring a charger and get into her car. Over the next five and half hours, the scammer had Del Mastro and her husband drive around a 25 mile radius around her Northern California home, draining the $6,000 she and her husband had liquid in their accounts and sending it through Western Union and MoneyGram sites and being sent elsewhere when a kiosk was unavailable.

When the scammers realized little was left, they directed her to a parking lot 25 miles away to supposedly meet her daughter. When she couldn't find her, Del Mastro called her daughter-only to find her at work. Scammers had cloned her voice. Del Mastro said she had no idea that was possible.