Cybercriminals are using generative artificial intelligence and synthetic media tools to scale phishing, vishing and callback scams into high-volume, high-precision operations that are harder to spot and costlier to contain.

The result is billions of dollars lost to fraudsters, according to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report, the most recent year for the report. The agency logged 859,532 complaints and $16.6 billion in losses last year, a 33% increase from 2023. Phishing and spoofing were the most common types of online crime, at 193,407 incidents...