Top 5 Fraud Trends of 2025

There are consistent factors in fraud, like social engineering tactics that exploit human behavioral tendencies or external financial pressures that lead fraudsters to commit their crimes, but there are also trends and themes that emerge and affect the anti-fraud profession on a more limited timeframe. 

Before getting into 2025 trends, it is worth revisiting the predictions for 2024 fraud trends: 

Scams Enhanced by Generative AI  

This trend came to fruition, with marked increases in the use of generative AI in schemes like phishing, business email compromise, account takeovers, impersonations, romance scams such as pig butchering, and more.  

A Resurgence of Cryptocurrency and Digital Asset Fraud 

It is difficult to pinpoint exact figures for financial crime involving cryptocurrencies for 2024, especially this early in 2025, but even if figures from the FBI or Chainalysis’s crypto crime reports for 2023 hold, the losses will likely be higher for 2024 due to the record high prices for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that crypto and other digital asset frauds did not lose any steam in 2024. 

Fraud Involving AI Service Providers 

There were at least a few cases of AI companies, and/or their leaders, misrepresenting their services. A few examples include an educational AI company’s founder being arrested for fraud, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charging the CEO of an AI recruiting company with fraud, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an operation targeting AI company’s misleading claims, which has already led to at least five lawsuits. 

Increased Obligations and/or Liabilities for Preventing and Detecting Fraud 

The UK’s Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act has not gone into effect yet, but will in September 2025, and the U.K. issued official guidance related to the act in November 2024. Neither of the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) or Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) officially updated their standards related to fraud, but the wheels of regulation move slowly and are still headed in the direction of increasing obligations for preventing and detecting fraud. 

Continued COVID Fraud Enforcement in the U.S. 

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice’s COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force (CFETF) released in April 2024, U.S. Attorney’s Offices and the DOJ’s Civil Division have opened more than 1,200 civil pandemic fraud matters and obtained more than 400 judgments or settlements netting more than $100 million in penalties, while also developing and rolling out database tools to detect and investigate fraud. The report also states that, “The CFETF and its member agencies have ongoing investigations into hundreds of identity thieves, transnational fraud and money laundering networks, large-dollar individual fraudsters and the businesses that facilitated these crimes. Government employees who chose to fraudulently obtain pandemic benefits are also being investigated. Civil enforcement tools are being utilized to recover misappropriated funds from businesses and individuals throughout the country. CFETF member agencies have improved their data analytics capabilities and are using these new skills to investigate fraud more efficiently and effectively. And the lessons learned by law enforcement from investigating pandemic fraud are being used to improve our investigatory efforts and passed on to the agencies tasked with administering benefit programs.”  

These trends from 2024 are expected to continue in 2025, but there is no fun in repeating the same trends, so here are the additional developments that will likely take shape.  

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Fraud Trends to Watch For in 2025 

Decrease in Pig Butchering Schemes 

Many people became aware of and familiar with the “Pig Butchering” scheme (a new spin on romance fraud in which victims are convinced to invest in sham cryptocurrency or digital asset platforms) in 2024. This awareness is approaching a critical mass that will likely force the criminal organizations behind these schemes to pivot their tactics.  

One way to analyze this is through the lens of the Nigerian Prince scheme introduced in the late 1990s as people began regularly using email; after a certain point, enough people became familiar with the scam that it became a punchline. It took a while for that to happen, and many people were victimized along the way, but the nature of the internet’s evolution combined with laudable efforts of law enforcement organizations’ and victim advocacy groups’ awareness campaigns will likely shorten the pig butchering scam’s shelf-life. There will still be pig butchering scam victims in 2025, but I believe this year will show that we will move past the peak of this scam’s efficacy.  

However, just because pig butchering scams might not be as effective or common by the end of 2025, anti-fraud professionals might not want to celebrate just yet… 

Cyber-Scam Losses Continue to Mount 

The types of criminal organizations that have invested operational resources into conducting the aforementioned pig butchering scams are not going to simply stop relying on scams and fraud for illicit income. As covered in a recent article by Fraud Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jen Liebman, hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims are in “forced criminality” situations in Southeast Asia, and similar cyber-scamming criminal organizations have been identified worldwide. The high revenues (Interpol estimates $3 trillion of profits per year globally) from cyberfraud and lower-risk nature of those criminal operations compared to drug-trafficking, extortion and other organized crime, guarantees that these types of scam operations are not going away anytime soon—even if one of the currently preferred modalities becomes less effective. These scammers are sure to develop fresh tactics to scam both individuals and organizations in 2025, facilitated by corruption in the areas where these scam centers operate. 

For further insights about what it is like on the inside of these scam centers, an ACFE webinar held in March 2025 will feature a firsthand account from a human trafficking survivor who managed to escape one of these scam centers. 

Synthetic Identity Fraud Increases 

The use of synthetic identities in a wide variety of fraud schemes is nothing new, but in 2025, the types of AI tools that bolstered scams in 2024 through deepfakes, image, document and text generation and automation, will be applied to the creation and use of synthetic identities in fraud schemes targeting government and private organizations at a higher rate. This will likely stem, at least in part, from a combination of the previous two trends; as scams targeting individuals and enhanced by AI become less effective, the criminal organizations orchestrating them will put those resources to use creating and deploying synthetic individual and business identities to carry out new account frauds, loan frauds, government benefit frauds, invoice frauds and more.

It has never been easier for fraudsters to create convincing fraudulent persons or organizations and do so at a rate that will likely overwhelm the preventive and detective controls that organizations have in place. Anti-fraud professionals involved in the prevention and detection of synthetic identity fraud schemes will need to stay on their toes all of 2025 and be ready to update controls and fraud risk management frameworks regularly to adapt to the increasing and evolving threat. 

Financial Institutions, Money Service Businesses and Telecommunications Companies Can Expect Increased Blame 

The practically unfathomable volumes of fraud revenues described thus far in this and last years’ trends blogs are understandably being accompanied by a general inclination to find new places to point fingers in blame. With resource limitations for investigation and prosecution plus a lack of will (or complicity), there is only so much that authorities can do on their own to stop fraud risks.  

Since fraud revenues generally have to pass through financial institutions and/or money service businesses at some point, while fraudsters also have to utilize telecommunications networks for the emails, chats, calls and messages that target victims, these types of businesses will likely face increased pressure from governments, regulators and victims to help stem the flow of fraud through their operations.  

Examples of what this could look like include Singapore’s brand-new scam liability framework for telecommunication companies and banks, civil suits from scam victims against financial institutions for not doing enough to prevent fraud, such as a recent suit filed by a pig butchering victim. Additionally, regulators could impose additional requirements related to fraud detection and prevention on financial institutions alongside well-established anti-money laundering (AML), combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) and know-your-customer (KYC) requirements. 

Anti-Fraud Professional Job Landscape Shifts 

What it looks like to be an anti-fraud professional and where those anti-fraud professionals work could look a lot different by the end of 2025. Regime/administration changes in many countries worldwide, including the U.S., is likely to result in many anti-fraud professionals leaving government positions (voluntarily or otherwise) and entering the private sector, which will have them facing different sets of risks and tasks.  

Simultaneously, the increasing fraud risks facing the private and public sectors are being met with an increased appetite/demand for technological solutions (especially those based on or incorporating AI) that will complement human efforts, which will require many anti-fraud professionals to learn how to best utilize and work alongside these tools. 

Anti-fraud professionals should place additional emphasis in 2025 on learning about emerging anti-fraud technologies and how they work to stand out in what will likely be a competitive job market.