Consumer Reports Survey Finds 9 in 10 Americans Targeted by Cyber Scams as AI Lowers the Cost of Fraud

Since UN officials pegged Southeast Asian scam farm losses at $18.2 billion for American victims in 2025, and the FBI flagged 277 crypto hacks this year alone, the fraud numbers keep climbing. Now a fresh survey puts a number on how many Americans are in the crosshairs: 90%.

Consumer Reports, Aspen Digital and the Global Cyber Alliance polled nearly 5,000 U.S. adults in March and April and found 9 in 10 had encountered a digital scam or cyberattack. Seventeen percent said they actually lost money, according to the survey reported by CBS News.

"Nine in ten Americans have been targeted by a scam or cyberattack," Consumer Reports president and CEO Marta L. Tellado said in a statement carried by CBS News. She's calling for companies to face accountability and for governments to set "real guardrails." No specific legislation is cited in that statement, and none of the available reporting points to a federal bill currently moving to address AI-driven fraud specifically.

Why AI Changes the Math for Scammers

Stacey Higginbotham, a Consumer Reports cybersecurity fellow, told CBS News the old assumptions about who gets scammed don't hold anymore. "People have stereotypes about who gets scammed, but it is truly everyone now, and AI is just going to accelerate that," she said. "I don't think we've seen even the beginning with the number and quality of scams reaching people."

The mechanism is straightforward. AI makes it cheap to turn a stolen batch of personal data into a convincing, personalized con. Higginbotham noted that scams used to come from strangers with obvious tells. Now a scammer who already has your address from a breach can pose as your bank and dangle a tailored mortgage offer.

A University finance professor writing for The Conversation laid out the voice-cloning problem directly. A grandparent gets a call that sounds exactly like a grandchild in trouble, except it's software that learned the voice from a social media clip. In one study cited in that piece, listeners could only correctly identify an AI-generated voice about 60% of the time, barely better than a coin flip.

The same piece points to the 2024 case of architecture firm Arup, where a finance employee wired roughly $25 million after a video call staffed entirely by deepfakes of the CFO and colleagues. The cyber insurer Resilience told the same source that more than 85% of its claims in the first half of 2026 came from attacks aimed at people, not computer systems.

Real Estate Closings Are a Growing Target

The Epoch Times reported that real estate closing fraud, where scammers intercept or redirect wire transfers at the final stage of a home purchase, jumped to more than $275 million in losses last year, up from roughly $173 million in 2024, citing the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report. Total cybercrime losses nationally hit $20.8 billion for the year, and the FBI logged more than 22,000 AI-related fraud complaints with losses exceeding $893 million.

Michael Kelczewski, a real estate broker and mortgage loan originator with MAK Realty, told The Epoch Times he personally encountered a fraudster who posed as a legitimate property owner using AI-generated ID documents that looked credible at first glance. "These schemes are no longer necessarily obvious or unsophisticated," he said. "Someone can present a fairly convincing package of identification, documents, and communications."

Jeremy Olsher, a broker associate at Mizner Residential Group, told the outlet that hearing a familiar voice or seeing a familiar face on video "is no longer a guarantee that we can trust our ears and eyes," and warned that any request to change wire instructions should be independently verified, not taken on the word of a call, text or email alone.

The Conversation cited a Deloitte projection that total U.S. fraud losses, AI-driven and otherwise, could hit $40 billion by 2027, up from $12.3 billion in 2023. Of the FBI's $893 million in confirmed AI-linked losses for 2025, investment fraud accounted for $632 million, and victims over 60 accounted for $352 million.

Those FBI figures only capture victims who actually filed a complaint and cases where investigators could positively identify AI's role. The true scale is almost certainly larger than the $893 million figure.

A reasonable skeptic could point out that "AI is why fraud is rising" is a convenient narrative for companies and advocacy groups pushing for more regulation, and that scams like romance cons and fake grandchild calls existed long before generative AI. That's fair. But the sources here aren't just making that claim in the abstract. The FBI's own complaint data shows AI-tagged cases now carry a specific, trackable dollar figure, and security researchers cited by The Conversation measured how often people can actually detect a cloned voice, which isn't well. The technology is measurably changing detection rates, even if it isn't inventing the underlying scam types from scratch.

No source in this reporting identifies a specific congressional bill, FTC rule, or state law currently advancing to address AI-enabled voice cloning or deepfake fraud. Whether lawmakers move on it, or whether the burden stays on banks, title companies and individual consumers to verify every wire transfer and phone call themselves, remains the open question heading into 2027.