A new analysis by Cybernews reveals that while the total number of reported cybercrime complaints is dropping, the financial damage is skyrocketing, indicating that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming common scams into highly targeted, high-value attacks.
The sheer scale of the losses is staggering: in 2024, the average cost of an investment scam hit $137,000, an amount more than the price of a fully equipped Tesla Model S. This represented a 13% increase from the previous year.
“AI is more likely to intensify existing risks than create entirely new ones,” explains Mantas Sabeckis, a Cybernews information security researcher. “It speeds up and scales threats, turning time-consuming manual targeting into instant, profitable schemes.”
The Deepfake Decoy: Losses Soar as Complaints Dip
The use of Generative AI (GenAI) by criminals is cited as a major factor behind the massive financial spike. While total reports of phishing scams dropped by 40% since 2021, the losses from these scams increased dramatically.
- Phishing Evolution: AI-generated phishing emails now boast a 54% click-through rate, easily outperforming the 12% rate of human-crafted attempts. With perfect grammar and tailored content, these emails are nearly impossible to distinguish from legitimate communication.
- The Impersonation Crisis: AI-powered scams are rapidly accelerating. A new report found AI impersonation scams have surged by 148%. The chilling reality of this was demonstrated when a finance professional was duped into paying out $25 million to scammers who used deepfake video technology to flawlessly impersonate the company’s CFO during a video conference call.
- The Targeting of Seniors: The elderly are being hit especially hard, with financial losses soaring to nearly $5 billion in 2024. Scammers use easily obtainable audio clips and “free voice AI” tools—searches for which more than doubled in 2025—to impersonate grandchildren or family members, creating panic-driven ‘fake emergency’ calls.
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Investment Crime Goes for the Big Score
Investment scams have become the gold standard for AI-enhanced fraud, with total losses reaching $6.5 billion in 2024. Cybernews predicts this figure could exceed **$11 billion** this year alone.
The average loss per investment victim has ballooned from $71,000 in 2021 to $137,000 in 2024. Scammers leverage AI to craft more believable schemes, even using deepfake videos of public figures like Elon Musk to promote fraudulent stock-trading platforms.
“Instead of spending hours manually scrolling social media, criminals now use AI to instantly scan countless Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, automatically identifying the most profitable targets,” Sabeckis notes. This wealth of public data, combined with powerful AI tools, creates a “playground for criminals” to build sophisticated, personalised scams like “Frankenstein IDs.”
With GenAI models like ElevenLabs and Runway rapidly growing their user bases and valuations, the tools for creating convincing, high-quality deepfakes are becoming more accessible than ever.
The analysis concludes that AI-driven attacks are currently outperforming defenses in everyday life, and a unified, tech-forward defense is now critical to halt the looming global cybercrime bill, which could reach $1 trillion every month by 2031.
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