Diving overview:
- The amount of money stolen by fraudsters and fraudsters worldwide last year increased by 9.2% compared to two years ago, and this increase was driven primarily by crimes powered by artificial intelligence, according to Nasdaq’s Verafin division.
- The organization, a division of Nasdaq that provides security services to financial institutions, recorded $579.4 billion in losses from bank fraud and scams in 2025, an increase of $53.3 billion from 2023, the last time Nasdaq Verafin tallied global fraud and scams, according to the division’s report. Global Financial Crime Report 2026published Wednesday.
- “It’s hard to put numbers on it, but we can see that AI is being used in everything fraudsters do on a daily basis,” he said. Nasdaq Bellafin’s Colin Parsons, head of fraud product strategy, said this during a panel discussion at Wednesday’s Payments Dive virtual event.
Dive Insight:
According to the report, $62 billion of fraud losses came from fraud-related losses, with this category increasing by 19.3% compared to 2023.
Meanwhile, banks incurred $517.4 billion in losses due to fraud, an 8.2% increase compared to 2023.
According to the report, losses due to cyber-assisted or AI-assisted fraud totaled $14.3 billion, an increase of 19.6% over two years.
The attack comes as 90% of financial crime experts surveyed for the report said that AI-powered attacks have increased in the past two years. The report is based on a model that considers research and estimates of nearly 500 fraud cases around the world, as well as a survey of cybersecurity experts.
But “with the advent of AI tools, these scams have become more sophisticated,” Parsons said. “The classic sign of a fraudulent email was a misspelled letter. That doesn’t exist anymore. And the scripts for chatting with victims are powered by AI and are getting better and better.”
Still, security experts are leveraging some of the same tools used by bad actors, including artificial intelligence that can identify common fraud patterns and raise red flags.
The AI program will spot these red flags and “block the payment, block the payment,” Parsons said.
Unfortunately, “while industries and businesses are leveraging these AI tools to increase efficiency and scale, fraudsters are doing the same,” he added.
Apart from digital fraud, Parsons said artificial intelligence could also make check fraud worse. “Scammers have the ability to alter checks to make them more realistic [stolen from someone’s mail] “Through image modification tools,” he said.
Security experts and consultants say common scams, such as romance scams and investment scams, in which perpetrators gain a victim’s trust and trick them into sending money, have remained largely unchanged.
