Protecting people and disrupting fraud at the speed of AI

Have you ever received a text message or email that appears to come from your bank, warning of a fraudulent transaction and urging you to click on a link to stop it? Or perhaps you received a call that appeared to come from a recognizable company asking you to validate personal information. Even when something feels off, many users today fall victim to fraud.   

Nobody is immune to fraud. Data from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shows that younger adults report fraud more often, but older adults lose the most money per incident. According to a 2025 report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), complaints from victims over 60 exceeded 201,000 and reported losses were more than $7.7 billion. Older adults are not the easiest victims to reach, but they are the most valuable ones to exploit. Seniors often have retirement savings, home equity, or accumulated wealth making them high-value targets.   

And as phishing becomes more persuasive with the use of AI, the cost of a single mistake has never been higher. This is why it is essential for organizations and governments to work together to build digital safety programs with tools, education, and coordinated and sustained action.  

The new fraud playbook

According to Ginny Badanes, General Manager of Tech for Society at Microsoft, fraudsters are using AI less to invent entirely new scam models than to improve familiar ones. They’re refining their language to avoid typos and grammatical errors, they’re translating content across geographies to target new victims, and they’re deploying these tactics faster and cheaper than ever before.

What makes this shift especially consequential is not simply that scams are becoming more convincing. It is that AI is lowering the cost and effort required to adapt familiar fraud tactics across markets, languages, and contexts, allowing fraud operations to scale more quickly across the digital ecosystem.

Fraud patterns are also shifting away from phone-based methods toward more online channels, where AI-enabled tactics may be easier to deploy and harder to detect. For policymakers and business leaders, the focus is now on implementing systems designed to prevent and disrupt these scams at the speed of AI.

Putting fraud-fighting tools in users’ hands

One part of that response begins long before a scam reaches a user. At Microsoft, product teams are required to assess fraud risks before shipping or launching new features, helping ensure that fraud prevention is considered earlier in the product lifecycle. This practice complements broader secure-by-design and responsible AI principles already embedded across the company and reflects a growing emphasis on identifying potential misuse before products reach people at scale.

That approach recognizes that fraud prevention is not only a downstream trust-and-safety issue. It is also a product design, engineering, policy, and governance challenge. “We have a responsibility to build products in ways that are not harmful and that people can use in a safe environment,” said Badanes. “And the more we see these tools be weaponized, particularly AI, by bad actors—that’s where we think we need to step in.”

One example of this is the Microsoft Edge Scareware Blocker. “The scareware detector,” according to Badanes, “is an AI tool where customers browsing the internet in Edge are warned before visiting certain scam sites that may try to incite panic in order to defraud victims.” The blocker intercepts deceptive pop-ups and fraudulent alerts before they can deceive users. By identifying scams that rely on manufactured urgency, the feature assures users that their data remains private, and their web browsing experience is secure.

Coordinated and sustained action disrupts fraud and cybercriminals

Prevention is essential through technology and education, but it is only one layer of defense. Effective fraud response also requires active disruption of the networks that enable scams to operate at scale. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) frequently works with law enforcement partners to dismantle criminal infrastructure and disrupt bad actors who weaponize technology against individuals and communities.

The DCU recently partnered with Japan’s Cybercrime Control Center (JC3) to take down a transnational tech-support fraud operation that used AI-enabled tactics to target older adults. Jimena Mora Corredor, Senior Corporate Counsel with DCU, noted, “A single malicious URL can serve as a critical entry point to uncover complex global criminal infrastructures—such as operations based in one country but targeting victims in another.”

Through close partnerships with organizations like JC3, and leveraging vast and diverse data sets, Microsoft is now able to identify patterns and behaviors that once took months to detect in a matter of minutes or hours. Mora Corredor also emphasized the role of AI in this effort. “One of the ways Microsoft is building a new approach to understanding scam activity and better supporting those affected is by using AI. As AI makes these attacks faster, more sophisticated, and more damaging, Microsoft is advancing its defenses and disruption efforts even faster.”

She continued, “By analyzing trillions of signals daily, Microsoft can generate powerful threat intelligence to better understand and respond to the evolving cyber threat landscape—ultimately helping to protect those most at risk, including older adults.”

Turning partnerships into stronger protection from fraud

In addition to disrupting cybercriminals that work together to create the Cybercrime-as-a-Service economy, we need to partner across industry, government, civil society, and law enforcement globally to help translate research, threat intelligence, and scam awareness into practical support for the communities most exposed to fraud. That is the role of Microsoft’s partnership with AARP and its Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) initiative. Through that work, Microsoft supports digital literacy and scam-awareness education and shares research insights with trusted intermediaries that can deliver them in meaningful, accessible ways.

“As AI becomes a part of our everyday life and gets infused into what we see online and how we communicate, it’s critical that we build a new way of thinking and interpreting what we’re seeing,” said Badanes. “While this is important for us as everyday consumers of information, it becomes more acutely important when you talk about the fraud environment. And that’s where we’ve built out our partnerships with AARP and OATS.” 

This work also includes Microsoft’s participation in the Industry Accord Against Online Scams and Fraud, signed in March 2026 alongside other major technology companies to strengthen information sharing and collaboration. Efforts like these matter because no single organization can solve the fraud challenge alone. More durable progress depends on cross-sector coordination that makes it harder for fraud networks to shift across platforms and continue operating unchecked.

AI fraud is scaling, but Microsoft’s response is scaling too. Through prevention, education, threat intelligence, coordinated disruptions, and partnerships, we are working to stay ahead of threats and reinforce trust in the technologies that people and communities rely on.