AI fraud & scams: what it is, and what’s happened in Australia
AI-enabled scams use cloned voices, synthetic video and generated text to impersonate someone convincingly enough that a person hands over money, access or trust. The con is old. What changed is the cost: a few seconds of public audio is now enough, so the same approach can be run against thousands of people at once.
- A cloned voice on the phone
- A familiar face on a video call
- A message in someone's exact style
Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation. Using AI systems to gain a personal advantage over others such as through cheating, fraud, scams, blackmail or targeted manipulation of beliefs or behavior. Examples include AI-facilitated plagiarism for research or education, impersonating a trusted or fake individual for illegitimate financial benefit, or creating humiliating or sexual imagery.
Definition and category 4.3 from the MIT AI Risk Repository, used under CC BY 4.0.
How experts rate it
With mitigations — 8.7%The difference between the two estimates — 2.8 points
Mean probability of a catastrophic outcome by 2030 — more than 1 million deaths, or more than USD 100 billion in financial loss, or comparable civilisation-scale intangible damage. Across 272 experts who took part. How this was measured
The study tabulates 5 of its 23 figures; this one was read from MIT's published chart on 18 August 2026.
Ranks 14 of 23 rated risks. This study published no interval for it, so the position of neighbouring risks is not meaningful. Experts put the difference at 2.8 percentage points.
Rank 14 of 23 by expert-rated severity, at 11.5%. See all 23 ranked
Evidence
- Evidence
Deepfake image-based abuse occurs at least weekly in Australian schools.
- Evidence
60% of professionals cite voice cloning as a major threat, with scammers needing just three seconds of audio to replicate a voice, and 70% of people can't distinguish cloned voices from real ones.
- Evidence
Over 50% of financial fraud cases now involve AI technologies.
- Evidence
Fabricated videos of Australian politicians Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher circulated in online investment scams.
- Evidence
AI can clone any person's voice using just 3 seconds of audio.
- Evidence
AI voice clones sound as real and human-like as human voices.
- Evidence
Australians lost $2.03 billion to scams in 2024, with concerning increases in losses in the final months of the year.
- Evidence
Voice deepfakes were identified as the most convincing and hardest to detect AI-generated content across the 2024 elections, Microsoft found.
- Evidence
Fraud losses from generative AI in the United States are expected to rise from USD $12.3 billion in 2023 to USD $40 billion by 2027, Deloitte predicts.
- Evidence
Deepfake videos increased by 550% between 2019 and 2024, and 500,000 voice and video deepfakes were shared on social media in 2024.
What's been called for
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What politicians have said
“It's extraordinary that the government has been on notice about the risks here for more than a year and almost nothing to stop the deepfakes being used to steal the election. They haven't even required that political AI deepfakes be labelled.”
David Shoebridge · · The Australian
AI fraud & scams
“Deepfakes [and] generative AI pose a real risk to democracy and we need the government to ban the use of this technology when it comes to elections.”
AI fraud & scams
“Now is the time for the government to act to safeguard our democracy and ensure elections are fought and won as a contest of ideas, not on the basis of who can produce the best deepfakes or tell the most convincing lies.”
David Pocock · · ABC News
AI fraud & scams
“Deepfakes used without consent threaten our democracy and should be banned in the context of elections. Australians deserve to know that the information they receive from parties and politicians is genuine.”
David Pocock · · Information Age
AI fraud & scams
What Australians say
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What people ask
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Think Australia should act?
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