Internet crime losses reported to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center hit $20.9 billion in 2025, up 26% from the year before. Adults age 60 and older absorbed the largest share by far — $7.7 billion, roughly a 60% jump from 2024 — and within that total sits a newer, faster-growing category: $893 million in losses tied specifically to AI-generated scams, including voice cloning used for "family in distress" calls and deepfakes used in investment schemes. Adults 60 and older accounted for $352 million of that AI-related total, according to the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, as summarized by AARP.
This is Part 2 of our ongoing scam series, and it's the installment Part 1 promised: the impersonation scheme built around a grandchild — or a spouse, or a parent — supposedly in trouble. What's changed since the classic version of this scam is the voice itself. It no longer has to sound roughly right. It can sound exactly right.
How a cloned voice actually gets made
Modern voice-cloning tools need only a short sample of someone's speech — a few seconds pulled from a public video, a voicemail greeting, or a social media clip is often enough — to generate synthetic audio that mimics their tone, cadence, and inflection. The FTC has warned that this technology is now accessible enough that the barrier to running this scam convincingly has collapsed. As the agency puts it plainly: "If a call sounds like your boss (asking for bank account numbers) or your family member (begging for help in an emergency), you're more likely to act."
That's the entire mechanism. The scam doesn't need you to be gullible — it needs you to be a normal person reacting to what sounds, unmistakably, like a loved one in genuine distress.
What the numbers say about how common this already is
A McAfee survey cited in a National Council on Aging guide found that one in four people had either encountered an AI voice scam themselves or knew someone who had, and 10% of those surveyed said they'd personally received a message from an AI-cloned voice. Among that group, 77% reported financial losses ranging from $500 to $15,000. This isn't a hypothetical, future-facing risk — it's already running at a scale that shows up in national survey data.
One documented case involved a woman in Brooklyn who received calls that sounded exactly like her in-laws, followed by demands for ransom money — the classic "grandparent scam" structure, just with real cloned audio standing in for the vague, static-y phone connection scammers used to rely on. The "arrested and need bail money" version of this call, once a red flag in itself because the voice never quite sounded right, no longer has that tell.
The verification habit that still works
- Hang up and call back on a number you already have. The FTC's core recommendation hasn't changed: call the person using a phone number you already had for them, not one provided by the caller, before acting on anything.
- Reach a different family member or friend if you can't reach the person directly. A second point of contact often confirms in seconds that the person supposedly in trouble is fine and has no idea a call was made.
- Set up a family code word, in advance, for real emergencies. A short phrase only your family would know — agreed on ahead of time, not invented in the moment — defeats a cloned voice instantly, because the scammer has no way to guess it.
- Don't act inside the emotional window the call creates. The fear response is the entire point. Hanging up and taking two minutes to verify costs you nothing if the emergency is real.
If it happens to you or someone you love
- Don't send money or gift cards based on the call alone, no matter how real the voice sounded or how urgent the request felt.
- Verify independently first, using contact information you already had — never a number the caller gave you.
- Report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, which helps regulators track the scale and tactics of this specific scam type.
- Talk about it with your family, especially older relatives — agreeing on a code word before an emergency call ever comes in is the single highest-leverage five-minute conversation a family can have on this topic.
Next in this series: the investment and crypto-specific scams built to look like the legitimate opportunities we cover on this site every week — and how to tell the difference before money changes hands.