This Week in Scams: Tolls, Recovery Cons, and AI Romance Fraud

Imposter and toll-text scams still lead the pack

Federal data confirms what AVASC's own incident tracking has shown for months: impersonation scams remain the most common fraud reported by consumers. The FTC reports that in 2025 it received more than 1 million imposter-scam reports, with losses increasing nearly 20% to $3.5 billion — the ninth straight year imposter scams topped its complaint list. The agency specifically flagged a 40% jump in government-imposter reports, driven largely by fake unpaid-toll text messages.

AVASC's database shows the same pattern: a nationwide wave of texts impersonating toll agencies, claiming small unpaid balances and linking to look-alike payment pages that harvest card and personal data. The FTC confirms these messages often spoof real systems — a pattern multiple state attorneys general, including Michigan's, have also warned residents about this year.

Separately, callers posing as the IRS, Social Security Administration, FTC, or police continue to threaten arrest or frozen accounts to pressure immediate payment by gift card, wire, or cryptocurrency — a tactic AVASC continues to see reported by incident after incident.

Watch out: fake 'recovery' offers targeting people who've already lost money

One of the most important — and most predatory — trends this period is scammers re-targeting prior fraud victims. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued a public service announcement warning that criminals are impersonating IC3 and FBI personnel, contacting past victims by phone, email, and social media to claim their stolen money has been located or can be recovered for a fee. The bureau has been blunt that this is a ruse: "Almost all complainants indicated the scammers claimed to have recovered the victim's lost funds or offered to assist in recovering funds," the FBI said. "However, the claim is a ruse to revictimize those who have already lost money to scams."

What makes this wave notable is the sophistication: the FBI says fraudsters are now using AI-generated videos, cloned voices, fake government websites, malicious links, spoofed phone numbers, and fake social media accounts to make the pitch more convincing. Separately, the FBI has previously warned that fictitious crypto 'law firms' are running a similar play against cryptocurrency-scam victims specifically.

This mirrors exactly what AVASC's own database has been seeing: prior victims contacted by fake recovery firms and people impersonating the FBI or IC3, promising to recover lost funds for an upfront fee. The real IC3 and FBI don't operate this way — a critical fact for anyone who has already been scammed and is desperate to recoup losses.

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

AVASC continues to track a cluster of romance-investment scams, sometimes called 'pig butchering,' in which a scammer builds an online relationship over time before steering the victim into a fake crypto trading platform. Losses per victim in these cases frequently reach five and six figures.

External reporting this period underscores why these scams are becoming harder to spot: syndicates are increasingly using AI to automate conversations, generate convincing fake identities, and target vulnerable individuals at scale, letting a small number of operators run thousands of simultaneous conversations. Investigators describe the mechanics plainly — deposits appear to climb once the target lands on a trading site the operators built; a withdrawal request then triggers a demand for taxes or fees owed before cash can leave the balance, and the platform disappears once that payment clears.

A common thread across today's fraud landscape, cited by industry researchers this week, is speed: nearly two-thirds of scam victims today pay within 24 hours of first contact, even in scams that traditionally took weeks of relationship-building to pull off.

Lingering lesson from this year's big-event ticket scams

Earlier this year, the FBI issued a public alert after identifying dozens of fraudulent websites spoofing FIFA's official site ahead of the 2026 World Cup, used to sell bogus tickets and hospitality packages and harvest personal data. The bureau's core advice — type fifa.com directly into your browser, check the URL carefully, and don't pay strangers through peer-to-peer apps — remains a useful template for any major event, concert, or high-demand sale: scammers reliably spoof official sellers and post fake resale listings whenever public excitement and urgency peak, a pattern AVASC expects to recur around upcoming holiday and sports ticketing windows.

What we're also seeing: task-based 'job' scams

AVASC's incident data continues to flag fake remote 'task' jobs — product rating or app-review gigs — that pay small amounts upfront before engineering a negative account balance and demanding the worker deposit their own money to 'unlock' earnings that never arrive. This tactic specifically targets people who are financially struggling and searching for flexible income, making it especially important for job seekers to treat any position that asks them to pay money to get paid as a hard stop.