Online Fraud Trends in 2025: What You Need to Know to Stay Safe

Fraud is a global industry. Everything from fake tech support popups to billion-dollar investment scams are all over the internet. And when you take a good look at scammers’ tactics and how online fraud trends have changed over time, you can understand how even seasoned scam experts can fall for it. But there are ways you can push back and avoid becoming a victim. See Can You Trust Anything Online? with Kitboga for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode. Kitboga is a content creator and anti-scam advocate best known for his YouTube channel The Kitboga Show, which has over 3.7 million subscribers. For the past eight years, he’s exposed online fraud tactics through scambaiting – pretending to be a victim to waste scammers’ time and understand their scripts. He’s famous for his mix of humor and advocacy and his ability to make scammers really angry. Kit is also the founder of Seraph Secure, the first anti-scam software, designed to block threats like remote access tools, phishing, and scam sites in advance and clean victims’ devices after the fact. He first became interested in scams about nine years ago. His grandmother had dementia and his grandfather had Alzheimer’s, and they fell for a lot of scams . Then he got a tech support scam popup. He knew it was fake, but realized his grandparents would believe it. So he started every fake phone number he found – if a scammer spent 10 minutes on the phone with him, that was ten minutes they weren’t scamming someone’s grandma. He started streaming on Twitch to a few friends. Then one day, a random viewer showed up and shared a clip to Reddit, where it blew up. The amount of people watching his streams kept increasing, and now it’s his life. Kit makes videos exposing scammers’ tactics. But he also has a few stories of being scammed. Back in his younger days, when he played a lot of video games, he fell for some of the more common Runescape scams. But his biggest one was just a few years ago, after he’d been scambaiting for six years. He received a message on Discord, which is a messaging app similar to Slack or Teams. The message said that there’s a Discord channel where somebody is impersonating him, and they’re being really gross and trying to get people to send nude images and such. Kit felt like there was something weird going on with the message. But he always clicks sketchy links to see what happens and because he wants to bait scammers. He thought maybe this could be his next YouTube video. So he clicked the link to join the Discord channel. It took him to a page asking him to scan a QR code to prove he’s not a robot. That wasn’t a big deal, so he tried to scan it with his phone camera. It didn’t work – it took him to a Discord login page on his phone. That was definitely weird. So he tried it again, and it did the same thing. Finally, he scanned it with the phone emulator he uses for scambaiting. It turned out to not be a verification QR code – it was a Discord login QR code. Scammers immediately took over the fake account on his emulator. The only reason he didn’t lose his Kitboga account was because he intentionally separates his work and personal lives so the account wasn’t on his phone. If his account had been logged in, he would have lost that, too. No matter who you talk to or what the current scam trends are, you’ll hear the same thing. Anybody can fall for a scam under the right circumstances. When it’s the right scam at the right time, whatever’s happening makes sense to the victim, or they’re busy or distracted, even experts can get caught. It can happen to anybody. … The right scam at the right time, [you’re] busy or concerned about something, and it just made sense. Kit wasn’t thinking too hard about it. He knew something was fishy, but expected it to be with the message sender or the Discord channel, not the verification process. And we have to do “prove you’re not a robot” activities online all the time. It didn’t seem like a big deal right then. This is why he’s been preaching more skepticism when it comes to things online. Especially when it comes to AI and deepfakes, there are constantly more revolutionary new ways to mimic things. It’s getting harder and harder to trust anything online. In the past, an easy way to spot scammers was to ask them to get on a video call. If they refused, or if the video was such poor quality that you couldn’t tell who you were talking to, they were a scammer. But now with AI, scammers can get on that call and look like anyone they want to in real time. For emails, the advice used to be to look at who’s sending it to you and make sure it’s coming from the right source. But now scammers have figured out they can send you PayPal invoices or DocuSign documents with whatever message they want, but though the message is a scam, the email itself really comes from PayPal or DocuSign. There are lots of online fraud trends in these areas right now, especially when it comes to romance scams. In one that Kit worked on, the scammer was pretending to be Jason Momoa, and even did a phone call with an AI voice changer to sound like Jason Momoa. The old advice is no longer valid – things keep changing. With investment scams, some of them let you take some of your money back out at first. Occasionally the scammer themselves will suggest it, convincing you both that it’s real and the scammer is someone you can trust. Most people assume if you got some money back out, it couldn’t be a scam, and that’s not true anymore. It’s becoming very common for scammers to use this tactic to convince victims it’s real, so victims then put in their life savings and convince others to do the same. The scammer doesn’t lose anything and it gives them an even bigger payday [Scammers] are going after your 401(k) now, not the $500 gift card. When people ask Kit for advice, his old advice was that whether you think you’re receiving a million dollars or owe that amount, urgency is key. But now with investment scams and pig butchering , it’s almost the opposite. You can spend months “trading” on a fake platform and seeing your money go up over time before the shoe drops. It’s not that scammers have given up on the quick game. There are still plenty of scammers who aim for a smaller but faster payout. But online fraud trends lately have leaned towards stringing victims along for months or even years before they steal a truly devastating amount of money. It’s the biggest change that Kit has seen in his eight years doing this. When he started, scammers primarily were after a $500 gift card. Now they’re willing to spend years getting your whole life savings. They’re on Telegram groups selling leads to other scammers and impersonating retirement savings companies. It’s very normal for these scammers to spend months or years manipulating someone, going after their entire life savings. The one piece of advice that continues to hold up is to be skeptical of anything on the internet. When you get that call or that email, stop, disconnect, and confirm with something you know is real. Even that can get tricky – if you’re Googling for the right phone number, scammers are running ads with fake phone numbers. It’s essential to be extremely cautious. In some areas, scams are advancing rapidly. AI is having a huge impact on online fraud trends, and that’s not going away. But if you look at things like the fake tech support popups that got Kit started nine years ago, those still exist. He got a message from someone recently whose family lost thousands to that exact scam. It’s barely changed in a decade. And they’re not deepfaking anything or using cutting-edge technology. These techniques work and they’re still making billions. In the pre-internet days, the Nigerian prince scam happened by fax machine. It’s a tried-and-true scam that’s been around over thirty years. We joke about it now, but it still gets people. Someone today sent Kit a photo of a letter their parents got in the mail trying to run this exact scam. Globally, scams steal over a trillion annually. These are the GDPs of nations. It’s not just one group doing it, it’s hundreds or thousands all over. And AARP recently put out a report saying 89% of people who knew they’d been scammed didn’t report it . Imagine what these numbers would look like if they included everyone who knew they had been scammed – or people who had been scammed but didn’t realize! It could be a $10 trillion problem. If you look at the fraud statistics, the amount of the billions they’re stealing just in the US is enough to put Scam Incorporated in the S&P 500. These are big, big, big dollars. Sometimes people ask Kit what he plans to do when all the scammers are gone. He would be perfectly happy to retire on a beach somewhere. But he doesn’t know if the scammers will ever go away. Historically, they probably won’t – they’ll just change their tactics. Kitboga and his team work with law enforcement to try to stop some of the scammers he’s come across. They’ve actually had a lot of success in bank fraud and identifying accounts that have been used for online fraud. They’ve expanded that to a bunch of AI bots that talk to scammers all day and gather hundreds of accounts each month. Then they pass them on to law enforcement and fraud teams. It’s been great over the years. The hard part is that law enforcement is just overwhelmed with scams. It’s tricky because scammers who aren’t moving millions aren’t particularly interesting to most three-letter agencies. They have bigger cases to deal with than someone who lost $100,000. Kit would love to see more support from the government, such as grants. As far as he knows, there’s no grant out there to build software or do things to help people. If someone right now wants to build something to push back against online fraud trends, they have to fund it themselves or get investors. And investing in these things almost has to be philanthropy, because very few people can make millions fighting scams. The government is very busy, but Kit would love to see them step up their game and provide more support. We almost need a War on Scams like we had the War on Drugs, where the government suddenly realized it was a big deal and created the DEA and DARE and things like that. Scams are a crisis and we need to do something about it. [We] need this war on scams. It’s a state of emergency on scams … because it just poses a really big threat. At one point, a friend of a friend fell for a tech support scam. She ended up going to the bank to wire $30,000, and the bank teller asked the right questions and stopped it. But she was panicked. She called their mutual friend crying and not understanding what happened. The friend called Kit. Scammers love to get access to computers because they can see through the webcam and access emails and bank accounts and basically invade someone’s whole life. Kit was on a conference call with this woman and their mutual friend trying to walk this woman through cleaning her computer. She wasn’t very tech-savvy and was terrified to touch the computer again because of what just happened. She was convinced she got hacked . In that moment, it was very hard to figure out how to help this woman. Afterwards, Kit started wondering what else could be done. He hit on the idea of building a software to clean people’s computers and remove remote connections after a scam. If someone breaks into your house, the police show up to “clear” your house and make sure no one is still there – this software would do the same for scammers’ access to your computer. And it wouldn’t have to just be retroactive. Kit also built in features to block remote connections in the first place and block suspicious websites. The software, Seraph Secure, is now available for free. He hopes that someday anti-scam software will be as common as antivirus . Windows devices even have antivirus built in with Windows Defender. Scam protection should also happen by default. We need it. What scam protection advice varies with the online fraud trends. But a lot of the advice you hear is the same things over and over. Kit also has some advice that’s less common. Beware scam recovery. It’s the scam after the scam. Scammers claim that, for a fee, they can get back the money that you lost to a scam. They can’t, and any money you give them is just more money you’re losing. They’ll try to give you hope, but it’s not worth it. Skepticism is essential. Never trust things are as they seem online. Always be cautious and verify. And just because it doesn’t have traditional hallmarks of a scam doesn’t mean it’s not one. Deepfakes are on the horizon. The average person probably doesn’t need to worry about these quite yet. But we are in a world where anyone can clone your voice with five seconds of audio. C-suite executives are already being targeted; these scams are probably what’s next. Remove remote access from your computer! There’s case after case of scammers getting access, and when you realize it’s a scam and fill out a report, they see you reported it, call pretending to be the FBI or your local police, and scam you again. Whether or not you want to use Seraph Secure, you have to get them off or they’ll just continue to re-victimize you. You can find Kitboga on his YouTube channel The Kitboga Show or on his website, kitboga.com . Learn more about Seraph Secure at seraphsecure.com .