Today in Scams: Imposter Calls, AI Voice Clones, $12.7B Crypto Con

Government-Impersonation Calls — and a Second Wave Targeting Past Victims

The FBI's Dallas field office issued a fresh public warning this past week on impersonation scams, noting that from January 2025 to July 2026, the FBI's IC3 received nearly 61,000 impersonation‑scam reports, with losses exceeding $1.6 billion. The bureau said scammers often spoof official numbers, use aggressive tactics, and demand payment through cryptocurrency, prepaid cards, or couriers, and reminded the public that government agencies will never call, text, or email to demand payment or request sensitive personal information. AVASC's own incident data shows this exact pattern active right now: callers posing as the IRS, Social Security, FTC, or police threatening arrest and demanding immediate gift-card, wire, or crypto payment.

A related, especially cruel variant is also live: scammers are re-targeting people who have already been scammed once. The FBI's updated IC3-impersonation advisory describes how this scheme combines several exploitation tactics to include the targeting of previous victims, the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos to create fictitious or misleading promotional materials for their fraud schemes, and the creation of spoofed websites with the purpose of gathering personally identifiable information. Other reporting on the same alert notes these scammers specifically target individuals who have previously been victims of fraud, falsely claiming they can recover stolen funds or assist with an active complaint. This matches what AVASC is seeing: fake 'fund-recovery' services and people impersonating the FBI/IC3 contacting prior victims with promises to get their money back for an upfront fee.

AI-Cloned Voices Are Turning Phone Calls Into Fake Family Emergencies

A case reported this week out of Orlando shows how convincing AI voice cloning has become. The FBI has said criminals can create short audio clips that mimic the voice of a loved one and use those recordings to impersonate someone in a crisis who needs money immediately, and the bureau has separately warned that scammers pose as a relative who has been arrested, introduce a fake attorney, and then arrange for a courier or rideshare driver to pick up cash supposedly needed for bail. Florida's own numbers underscore the scale: IC3's 2025 Florida data lists 2,183 complaints with an AI-related descriptor and more than $77 million in associated reported victim losses (these figures cover multiple AI-related cybercrime types, not voice cloning alone).

Romance-Investment ('Pig Butchering') Crypto Scams: A Record $12.7 Billion

Treasury's financial-crimes unit confirmed what AVASC has been tracking for months. FinCEN's early-September alert linked about $12.7 billion in suspected activity across 33,904 Bank Secrecy Act reports to digital-asset investment scams run by overseas scam centers, and issued an alert urging financial institutions to report suspicious activity. FinCEN uses the terms "pig butchering," "romance baiting," or "cryptocurrency confidence schemes" for these sophisticated fraud operations, and notes that professional money launderers integrate scam proceeds into the formal financial system through networks of money mules and through stablecoin transfers to digital asset exchanges outside of the United States. This lines up directly with AVASC's active incident cluster describing AI-run syndicates that maintain thousands of simultaneous romance-investment conversations, funneling victims into fake crypto platforms with losses frequently reaching five and six figures per victim.