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

Government & Agency Imposters Remain the #1 Reported Scam

Federal data continues to confirm what AVASC's own case reports show: scammers posing as the IRS, Social Security Administration, FTC, or police remain the most common fraud reported to authorities. According to the FTC, fraud losses hit $15.9 billion in 2025. The FTC calls imposter scams the #1 fraud category for the ninth year running, with $3.5 billion stolen in 2025.

The FBI's Dallas field office reinforced this just this past week. From January 2025 to July 2026, the FBI's IC3 received nearly 61,000 impersonation‑scam reports, with losses exceeding $1.6 billion. Scammers often spoof official numbers, use aggressive tactics, and demand payment through cryptocurrency, prepaid cards, or couriers. As the FBI put it plainly, government agencies will never call, text, or email to demand payment or request sensitive personal information.

This matches exactly what AVASC's incident database is seeing this period: callers posing as federal agencies threatening arrest or frozen accounts unless the person pays immediately by gift card, wire, or crypto. If someone demands an untraceable payment method and won't let you hang up and verify independently, that is the clearest available signal of a scam.

Toll-Text Smishing Keeps Rotating State to State

The fake "unpaid toll" text wave that AVASC first flagged in late spring has not slowed. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued an alert warning that a nationwide SMS phishing, or smishing, campaign is impersonating state toll authorities and has generated thousands of complaints. The scam texts claim a small outstanding toll debt, usually up to around $25, and threaten a late fee to pressure recipients into clicking a link to a fraudulent site mimicking a real toll service like E-ZPass.

The campaign uses generative AI to automate and scale the smishing messages, and often targets residents of states without toll roads, since most toll agencies communicate primarily through mail. That detail is itself a useful tell: legitimate toll agencies do not send payment requests via text.

AVASC's public incident data aligns closely here — our records show the same multi-state pattern, with state DOTs and courts issuing parallel public warnings as lookalike payment pages continue to harvest card and personal information.

AI Is Accelerating Romance-Investment ("Pig Butchering") Scams

AVASC's database this period includes reports describing syndicates running thousands of simultaneous romance-investment conversations — and outside reporting backs this up. AI is being used to automate conversations, generate convincing fake identities, and target vulnerable individuals at scale, while cryptocurrencies facilitate near-instant, cross-border transfers that are difficult to reverse. Chainalysis reports that AI-powered cryptocurrency scams resulted in four times as much revenue as traditional scams in 2025.

These schemes remain costly: investment scams drove the biggest losses of any category, roughly $7.9 billion, nearly half of all money lost to fraud. Enforcement is responding — U.S. prosecutors recently charged a man in a case where a single victim was persuaded to send roughly $16 million in cryptocurrency to a fake trading platform, with other U.S. victims tracing additional losses to the same wallet network.

The pattern described in AVASC's data — a warm, patient online relationship that eventually pivots to an "exclusive" crypto platform — matches the national trend precisely. The platform's fake trading dashboard is the product being sold, not a real investment.

If You've Already Lost Money, Watch for Fake "Recovery" Offers

AVASC flagged a notable rise in fake fund-recovery contacts this period, and federal warnings issued this summer describe the exact same scheme. This scheme combines several exploitation tactics, including the targeting of previous victims, the use of AI-generated videos to create fictitious or misleading promotional materials, and the creation of spoofed websites built to gather personal information.

Recovery scams are a cruel form of online fraud because they rely on revictimizing people who have already fallen for an investment scam, romance scam, fake online store, cryptocurrency fraud, or another scheme. Scammers often work from "sucker lists" — lists that can include a victim's name, address, phone number, type of scam and amount paid, which criminals buy and sell because they believe someone who paid once may pay again.

The single most reliable protective fact here: the FBI's IC3 has no social media accounts, never reaches out to people through phone apps, chat, or DMs, and never charges a fee to recover funds. Any unsolicited message claiming to be IC3, the FBI, or a "recovery specialist" offering to get your money back for an upfront fee should be treated as a second scam attempt, full stop.

Task-Based "Job" Scams Keep Draining Household Budgets

AVASC's data shows task-based job scams — fake "product rating" or "app review" work — continuing to target financially struggling workers, and federal figures show just how fast this category has grown. Reports of task scams increased from zero in 2020 to 5,000 in 2023, then quadrupled to about 20,000 in just the first half of 2024. Overall reported losses on job scams were more than $220 million in just the first six months of 2024.

The pattern is consistent nationwide: small early payouts build trust, then the "job" asks workers to deposit their own money — usually in cryptocurrency — to unlock withdrawals that never arrive. As the FTC warns, no honest company pays people to like videos or rate products, and no real employer ever asks a worker to pay in order to get paid.

What AVASC Is Seeing

Beyond the categories above, AVASC's incident intake this period also includes reports of spoofed ticket-resale sites clustering around high-demand events, where fans pay peer-to-peer for tickets that never materialize. We're watching this closely as major 2026 events approach and will update readers if it accelerates. Across every category this week, the common thread is the same one regulators keep repeating: urgency plus an irreversible payment method (gift card, wire, crypto, or a courier pickup) is the signature of a scam, not a legitimate transaction.