This Week in Scams: Recovery Scams, Toll Texts & AI Romance Cons

If you've already been scammed, you may be targeted again

The FBI issued a public service announcement this summer warning that criminals are impersonating FBI personnel and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) to contact people who have already lost money to a scam, falsely claiming they can recover the stolen funds. The bureau says fraudsters are now using AI-generated videos, cloned voices, spoofed government websites, and fake social media accounts to make the ruse more convincing.

One documented pattern: after a victim tells their original scammer they plan to report the fraud to the FBI, someone posing as an FBI agent contacts them soon after — often through Facebook Messenger — offering to help. In a related variant, fake websites closely mimic ic3.gov and collect a name, phone number, email, scam type, and loss amount before issuing a fake reference number and promising a follow-up that never materializes.

The FBI is explicit on this point: IC3 does not maintain any social media presence, does not initiate contact by phone, email, or messaging apps, and never charges a fee or refers victims to a third party to recover lost funds. This aligns directly with what AVASC's own incident tracking is seeing this period — prior victims across multiple scam types being re-approached by fake recovery services and people impersonating IC3/FBI, exploiting the fact that they are already primed to want their money back.

Toll-text scams keep rolling across state lines

State transportation agencies and attorneys general continue to warn about a long-running smishing wave impersonating toll agencies. Officials note that state tolling agencies across the country have seen a surge in fake texts requesting money for unpaid tolls, aimed at stealing personal and financial information. Some campaigns now use QR codes and even fake court "civil infraction" notices to add pressure.

Security researchers tracking these campaigns globally found fraudsters used tens of thousands of scam text messages with over 29,000 unique variants, redirecting victims to fake payment sites or malware downloads. Officials note that legitimate toll agencies do not text customers demanding immediate payment and that official links will always match the agency's real, spelled-correctly domain.

This matches what AVASC has been seeing since late spring: a nationwide unpaid-toll smishing wave impersonating toll agencies, using look-alike payment pages to harvest card and personal data, prompting warnings from multiple state DOTs and courts.

AI is supercharging romance-investment ("pig-butchering") scams

Romance-investment fraud — sometimes called "pig-butchering" — continues to escalate in scale and sophistication. Reporting this year describes criminal networks using agentic AI to automate the grooming process, allowing AI agents to maintain thousands of deep, personalized relationships simultaneously, a leap from the days when scammers manually managed a handful of conversations at once.

Industry data show the financial scale involved: cryptocurrency addresses associated with pig-butchering operations received over $9.3 billion in 2025, with the average victim losing roughly $178,000 before the fraud was detected or reported. An AARP study found that almost one in ten adults over 50 has been asked to send money or invest in cryptocurrency through an online romance connection.

AVASC's data mirrors this trend: our incident reports describe syndicates using AI to run mass romance-investment cons that funnel victims into fake crypto platforms, with losses per victim frequently reaching five and six figures — consistent with the broader external reporting.

Task-job scams remain a top complaint category

Task or "gamified job" scams — where victims are recruited via unsolicited text or messaging app to do simple tasks like rating apps or liking videos — continue to drive job-scam losses. The FTC's guidance describes how these scams typically begin with an unexpected text or message offering vague online work, then pay a small amount to build trust before asking victims to deposit their own money, usually in crypto, to unlock further "earnings."

FTC data show this pattern has grown sharply: reports of task scams rose from essentially zero in 2020 to about 20,000 in just the first half of 2024, and task scams were estimated to account for nearly 40 percent of that year's job-scam reports. AVASC's own incident data for this period shows the same mechanic: fake remote task jobs paying small amounts before engineering a negative balance and demanding a deposit to withdraw earnings that never arrive — hitting financially struggling workers especially hard.

World Cup ticket scams and government-imposter calls persist

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center warned that threat actors are spoofing FIFA's website using minor misspellings or alternate domain endings — a technique called typosquatting — to sell fake World Cup tickets and hospitality packages while harvesting personal information. One Indianapolis fan reportedly lost $22,000 after paying an individual claiming to have access to sponsor tickets, with no tickets ever delivered.

Meanwhile, government-impersonation calls remain a persistent threat. AVASC continues to see reports of callers posing as the IRS, Social Security Administration, FTC, or police, threatening arrest or frozen accounts and demanding immediate payment via gift card, wire transfer, or cryptocurrency — a pattern that has long topped FTC's reported fraud categories nationally.