Tech companies pledge to cooperate in fighting AI-facilitated scams

A coalition of major tech companies and retailers have pledged to work together to combat online scams, as the United Nations Global Fraud Summit kicks off in Austria this week.

Eleven brands, including Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Match Group — which owns the dating apps Hinge and Tinder — signed an industry accord promising to share intelligence about threats on their platforms with each other and law enforcement and to beef up detection and enforcement.

Financial losses due to scams have exploded in recent years as AI tools have enabled more and more sophisticated schemes. Consumers and organizations lost $62 billion in financial fraud scams in 2025, according to a report from Nasdaq Verafin. That amounts to an increase of almost 20% compound annualized growth since 2023.

“So we think of the phishing attacks that have been happening for years, those are becoming cleaner, much more difficult to detect, but also more personalized,” Williamson said.

That means no more misspellings or low-quality graphics. Eric O’Neill, author of “Spies, Lies and Cybercrime,” said any scammer can now run the type of sophisticated long con that used to require massive time investments and specialized skills.

“The criminal can launch multiple attacks at once, and… has a fleet of evil AI agents doing the work for them,” O’Neill said.

Agents can comb through social media to find biographical information about potential victims and create online profiles with convincing AI-generated photos and backstories. They can create fraudulent websites, chat with victims, or even appear on video.

Those are sometimes called “pig butchering scams” because criminals build up trust over a long period of time before they strike. Mikey Pruitt, head of AI labs at DNSFilter, said the contact often starts on dating apps, then moves to social media or messaging platforms.

“The problem is, they each see a segment of the scam,” Pruitt said. “So they're catching one piece, and Meta is catching another, and then Amazon is catching another.”

Coordination between those various services is crucial to catching crimes before they happen, said Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society.

“Scams are a global problem,” Marwick said. “They're perpetrated by global criminal organizations, and they affect people all over the world.”

She said the problem isn’t one that a single country, or even a single platform, will be able to fix on its own.

Correction (March 18, 2026): This story was changed to clarify that $62 billion were lost in fraud scams in 2025, and that reflects nearly 20% compound annualized growth since 2023.