12% of successful scams in 2025 used AI or deepfakes, according to poll of U.S. adults

As AI is adopted across industries, it’s also being taken up by scammers.

As AI is adopted across industries, it’s also being taken up by scammers. Around 6% of U.S. adults, or about 15 million people, were scammed out of money last year, a new Gallup and Stop Scams Alliance survey finds, and victims reported that 12% of those scams involved AI or deepfakes.

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“These guys aren’t called organized crime for nothing. They’re actually organized, and they’re using their organization to start attacking us with scale now to a tune of $68 billion, which is like the annual revenues of Delta Airlines. It’s like a Fortune 500 company. It’s huge,” Stop Scams Alliance founder and CEO Ken Westbrook told NBC News. The Stop Scams Alliance is a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce scams in the U.S.

The survey of 5,173 U.S. adult respondents in January through February, which relied on participants’ self-reporting their scam experiences, said that “the use of AI may be difficult to detect by scam victims.”