Finextra | Financial schemes and scams cost consumers and businesses more than $1 trillion worldwide in 2024, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. Once calculated, the 2025 number will no doubt be higher.

Financial crime is profitable, so it’s not surprising that greedy entrepreneurs are in the business alongside organized crime groups. They create a constantly evolving ecosystem of target-identification methods and attack strategies.

And as Operation Shamrock and other organizations explain, many of the people committing the actual scams are forced to do so. Human trafficking victims in scam compounds are required to spend their days using carefully crafted scripts to engage with people around the world and lure them into scams — under threat of violence.

Crime organizations take full advantage of generative AI tools to run their operations at massive scale. They use AI-generated content translation for chat, deep-fake faces and voices for video interaction, fake websites, and more to build trust in interactions with victims. Technology lets them be anyone they want to be.

Effectively combating fraud and scams means staying up to date with that ecosystem. To date, it’s largely a reactive approach of deploying education, technology, and legal strategies and actions to support consumers, businesses, law enforcement, and the financial services industry.

For financial services in particular, it requires constant awareness, improved cooperation and information sharing, and the implementation of resources for threat identification and deterrence. And doing all this despite the potential impact on the speed of banking and commerce systems.

Full article: Why Financial Crime Persists More than Ever in an AI-enabled World