Artificial intelligence is giving old-school scammers a high-tech makeover, and Visa says everyday consumers are paying the price. From July through December 2025, the company says it identified nearly $1 billion in scam-related activity, with criminals increasingly tricking people into authorizing transfers themselves. Those social-engineering schemes are now the fastest-growing form of consumer payment harm.
In a report published today, the San Francisco Business Times quoted Michael Jabbara, senior vice president of payment ecosystem risk and control at Visa, who said, "What once required deep technical skill can now be executed with a prompt." The outlet notes that Visa is calling for faster intelligence-sharing among banks, merchants and law enforcement to blunt AI-enabled impersonation attacks.
What Visa Found
Last week, Visa published its Spring 2026 Biannual Threats Report, drawing on intelligence from the company’s global payments network and documenting a major shift: as network-level security improves, criminals are focusing more energy on deceiving people directly. The report lists four key trends: security is working but fraud is migrating; scams are accelerating; AI is transforming fraud; and ransomware economics are shifting.
Visa says it recorded nearly $1 billion in scam-related activity between July and December 2025. Over that same period, the company reports that global ransomware activity rose 26%, while only 23% of victims paid ransoms, a split that is reshaping how criminals weigh their odds of getting paid.
How AI Changes the Economics of Fraud
Generative AI has made it cheap and easy to mass-produce convincing phishing messages, realistic fake websites and voice clones that can impersonate trusted brands or even family members. That lowers the barrier for large-scale scams and helps fraudsters sound far more polished than the stereotypical scam call of years past.
PYMNTS summarized Visa’s warning that defenders will need to roll out more advanced detection models and coordinate across the entire payments ecosystem if they want to keep up with AI-boosted fraud campaigns.
Scams Hit Home
The tactics Visa describes are not confined to the theory. They are popping up in neighborhoods across the country. Hoodline recently chronicled a case, a Denver ATM tap scam, in which a fraudster posing as a bank employee walked a local resident through a series of steps that ended in a $9,500 loss.
That case and other local reports show how spoofed caller ID, urgent language and directions to use unusual payment channels can steer victims around the usual consumer protections, even when the underlying payment systems themselves are secure.
How to Protect Yourself
Consumers can blunt these attacks by treating any unexpected payment request as suspicious, especially if it comes with high-pressure tactics. Never share one-time passcodes or passwords with anyone, even if the caller seems to know your account details.
If you receive a call, text or email about your account, hang up or close the message and contact your bank using a phone number from the bank’s website or the back of your card. If you believe you have been targeted or scammed, contact your bank immediately and report the incident to the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov so authorities can track patterns and respond.
Industry Response
Visa says it is leaning on continuous, AI-driven transaction monitoring, a specialized scam-disruption team and network-level disruption efforts to detect and block large fraud campaigns before they hit consumers’ accounts. The company is urging deeper cooperation among banks, merchants and law enforcement to dismantle organized scam operations and is highlighting intelligence-driven defenses as essential in the current environment.
As Visa’s data and local reporting both suggest, the real battleground is less about the payment rails and more about the people at the end of them. For readers who want more detail, see coverage by the San Francisco Business Times.
