The video call looked like his company's leadership. It wasn't. He paid $500,000.

Deepfake fraud has gone "industrial," according to an analysis from the AI Incident Database. Tools to create tailored, personalized scams — deepfake videos of Swedish journalists, the president of Cyprus, Western Australia's Premier Robert Cook hawking an investment scheme, deepfake doctors promoting skin creams — are no longer niche. They're inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale.

Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with his company's leadership. UK consumers are estimated to have lost £9.4bn to fraud in the nine months to November 2025. Frauds, scams, and targeted manipulation made up the largest proportion of reported AI incidents in 11 of the past 12 months.

"Capabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be produced by pretty much anybody," said Simon Mylius, an MIT researcher linked to the AI Incident Database. "There is really effectively no barrier to entry." Fred Heiding, a Harvard researcher who studies AI-powered scams, added: "It's becoming so cheap, almost anyone can use it now. The models are getting really good."

Jason Rebholz, CEO of the AI security company Evoke, posted a job listing and was immediately contacted by a deepfake candidate. The video took nearly a minute to load. The background was "extremely fake." He went through with the interview anyway, not wanting to confront the candidate directly. He still doesn't know what the scammer wanted. "If we're getting targeted with this," he said, "everyone's getting targeted with it."