In 2025, fraudsters continued finding new ways to perpetrate schemes. Drawing from industry trends, news stories and expert insights from the ACFE staff, this recap highlights some of the most prominent fraud schemes and developments taking place this past year.
In 2025, fraudsters continued finding new ways to perpetrate schemes. Advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), is exploiting weaknesses across digital and traditional systems, requiring even more innovation and proactive approaches to combat fraud. Drawing from industry trends, news stories and expert insights from the ACFE staff, this recap highlights some of the most prominent fraud schemes and developments taking place this past year.
Synthetic identity fraud has become one of the more sophisticated and persistent forms of fraud, with AI accelerating its growth. Fraudsters continue to combine real consumer data, such as Social Security numbers, with fabricated names, addresses and contact information to construct identities that appear legitimate across financial systems. These synthetic profiles can be used to open accounts, obtain lines of credit or apply for government benefits. Fraudsters can build credit histories over time by making small payments to gain trust before eventually defaulting on high credit limits. In doing so, this leaves financial institutions with massive losses and no real individual to hold accountable.
The scale of synthetic identity schemes was seen in the Toronto Police Service’s investigation, Project Deja Vu, where investigators uncovered a sophisticated synthetic identity ring that began in 2016. The perpetrators are alleged to have created more than 680 unique synthetic identities to attack banks and financial institutions in Ontario, Canada, resulting in approximately $4 million in losses.
Cryptocurrency-related fraud remained a popular illicit activity amongst fraudsters, as well-organized networks targeted both consumers and larger platforms. Large-scale investigations continued throughout the year, including findings from “The Coin Laundry” investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Their investigation revealed a network of international groups using crypto assets to move illicit funds across borders. In addition, a recent Europol operation busted a crypto fraud network that moved more than $815.75 million through fake investment platforms spanning beyond Europe.
With the increase in cryptocurrency scams, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stresses that legitimate businesses should never require or demand cryptocurrency as payment, and ”investors” promising to quickly and easily make you money in the crypto markets should not be trusted until properly vetted.
Account takeover fraud saw significant growth as criminals used impersonation, phishing and SIM-swapping to gain unauthorized access to financial accounts. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) warned how fraud attackers will pose as bank representatives and convince victims to divulge login credentials or authentication codes. Once obtained, these credentials are used to reset account access and rapidly transfer or withdraw funds.
Instead of convincing victims to authorize transactions of their accord, technological advancements have given fraudsters the ability to bypass multi-factor authentication, hijack victim accounts and make unauthorized transactions themselves. In November 2025, the FBI reported more than 5,100 complaints and more than $262 million in losses dating back to January, reflecting the massive impact this scheme has across banking, payroll and health savings platforms.
Advances in generative AI helped increase the sophistication of document fraud by giving fraudsters the option to create financial documents that are entirely synthetic and lack any original source file or trail. This includes fraudulent pay stubs, bank statements, invoices and tax records now being constructed with realistic formatting, logos and signatures designed to bypass intense document checks. This trend presents a major verification challenge because detection methods traditionally relied on comparing submitted documents against known templates or prior submissions. However, when the fraudulent document itself does not have a known, traceable origin, verification becomes nearly impossible.
The scale of this scam was reflected in a research project from Sumsub, which reported a 311% increase in synthetic identity document fraud between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, signaling how quickly AI tools propped up the scheme.
Deepfake activity advanced substantially in 2025, leading to a rise in digital injection attacks where AI-generated media is fed directly into biometric and identity verification systems. Fraudsters will use synthetic faces, manipulated videos or fabricated voices to complete a “liveness” check or authentication steps required for an account to be created or logged in to. These specific attacks bypass the camera entirely by injecting falsified media at the software level.
This technology supports impersonation scams as well, particularly those involving government agencies. In November 2025, a Canadian retiree lost thousands of dollars after falling victim to a deepfake video of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. The fraudsters leveraged a form of digital injection by successfully feeding the fake interview, which promoted a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment company, into advertising networks and other platforms to directly target their victims.
Banks and financial Institutions continued to face high exposure as fraud schemes grew more complex and more automated. According to the “2025 State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the United States” report, large banks reported fraud losses nearly four times the industry average. Additionally, 46% of financial institutions noted an increase in fraud sophistication, driven by synthetic identities, account takeovers and more.
Health care remains one of the more heavily targeted sectors by fraudsters. The U.S. Department of Justice announced significant enforcement actions, including a massive takedown involving 324 defendants connected to $14.6 billion in alleged health care fraud. Common health care schemes included billing fraud, kickbacks, identity theft, fraudulent tele-med operations and misuse of government health programs. Even with consumer scams growing in scale, the health care industry continues to host some of the largest and most complex fraud schemes.
Technology companies faced continued risk from data breaches, vendor compromises and credential exposure. For example, Coinbase released a statement in May announcing a serious breach after cyber criminals “bribed and recruited a group of rogue overseas support agents to steal Coinbase customer data to facilitate social engineering attacks.” Incidents such as the Coinbase and Salesforce breach of almost 1 billion records proved how interconnected systems and third-party integrations can amplify and exploit vulnerabilities. These breaches often lead to downstream fraud, including account takeovers, phishing campaigns and identity creation using compromised data.
Government agencies faced persistent threats from fraud schemes targeting benefits programs, procurement processes and taxpayer data. Impersonation of government officials remained a frequent tactic in 2025, often being supported by deepfake audio or video. In addition to government employee impersonations, synthetic identities were also used to submit fraudulent applications for government benefits.
Retail organizations saw continued increases in payment fraud, account takeovers, refund abuse and real-time payment scams. Insights into e-commerce fraud shows online retailers are projected to lose around $52 billion in online payment fraud this year, with a cumulative loss expected to reach $225 billion by 2029. In 2025, global e-commerce fraud losses are projected to reach $138.56 billion, reflecting the growing challenges retailers continued to face throughout the year.
Social engineering remained a core component of fraud schemes throughout 2025, with AI tools influencing both the scale and execution of these tactics. Fraudsters relied on impersonation, credential theft and manipulation to initiate account takeovers, authorize unauthorized payments and gather sensitive information. This technique was vital towards the growth of schemes like account takeover fraud, in which the FBI reports fraudsters are posing as bank representatives to convince victims to share their login credentials.
AI capabilities increased the speed and consistency of fraud attempts, making them even harder for victims to identify — and easier for fraudsters to execute schemes at a high rate. The combination of traditional social engineering techniques and modern AI-driven tools made this scheme particularly impactful in 2025, affecting nearly every major fraud trend documented this year. Organizations must strengthen fraud prevention measures to defend against complex social engineering schemes, as the prevalence and scale of these tactics in 2025 means passive vigilance is no longer an option.
