Dive Brief:

• The amount of money stolen by scammers and fraudsters last year rose 9.2% across the globe compared to two years ago, an increase driven largely by criminals leveraging artificial intelligence, according to Nasdaq's Verafin unit.
• The organization — a division of Nasdaq that provides security services to financial institutions — recorded $579.4 billion lost to bank fraud and scams in 2025, an increase of $53.3 billion from 2023, the last time Nasdaq Verafin tallied worldwide fraud and scams, according to the unit's 2026 Global Financial Crime Report, published Wednesday.
• "While it's hard to put a number on it, we see AI in everything the day-to-day fraudsters are doing," said Nasdaq Verafin’s head of fraud product strategy, Colin Parsons, said during a Wednesday Payments Dive virtual event panel discussion.

Dive Insight:

The report from Nasdaq’s Verafin unit said $62 billion of the fraud losses were due to losses related to scams, giving a 19.3% increase to that category compared to 2023. Meanwhile, banks bore $517.4 billion of the fraud losses, an 8.2% increase compared to 2023.

Nasdaq, which operates the Nasdaq Stock Market, agreed to acquire the Verafin software business in 2020 for $2.75 billion.

Also according to the report, cyber-assisted or AI-enabled scams were responsible for $14.3 billion in losses, a 19.6% increase over two years.

Behind the attacks, 90% of the financial crime professionals surveyed for the report said they saw an increase in AI-driven attacks in the past two years. The report was based on a model that took into account nearly 500 fraud studies and estimates from across the world, along with a survey of cybersecurity professionals.

However, "those scams have gotten better with the advent of AI tools," Parsons said. "Classic indicators of a scam email were spelling mistakes. That doesn't exist anymore. And the scripts that they have for chatting with their victims are driven by AI, and they are just getting better and better."

Still, security professionals are leveraging some of the same tools that bad actors use, including artificial intelligence, which can identify patterns in common scams and raise red flags.

AI programs spot those red flags and "interdict a payment and prevent it from going out the door," Parsons said.

Unfortunately, "as industries and businesses are leveraging these AI tools for more efficiency and increasing scale, fraudsters are doing the same thing," he added.

Aside from digitally driven fraud, artificial intelligence can worsen check fraud too, Parsons said. "Fraudsters have the ability to make much more realistic modifications to checks [stolen from someone's mail] through image modification tools," he said.

Security experts and consultants say common scams have largely stayed the same — such as romance and investment scams in which the perpetrator gains a victim's trust and then tricks the person into sending money.