Amy Scott

Adam Clark Estes is a senior tech correspondent for Vox, where he wrote about plant-based products, food and otherwise.

Thanks so much.

A coalition of big tech companies and retailers is coming together to fight online scams.

At the UN Global Fraud Summit that kicked off in Austria today, brands including Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and Match Group, the dating app company, signed an industry accord.

They promised to share intelligence about threats on their platforms with clients.

each other and with law enforcement and to step up fraud detection efforts.

Financial losses due to scams have exploded in recent years as AI tools have enabled more sophisticated schemes.

Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino has more on the new agreement.

Consumers and organizations lost $62 billion in financial fraud scams between 2023 and 2025, according to a new report from Nasdaq Verifin.

The toll has grown by almost 20 percent as AI has industrialized scamming, says Verifin fraud expert Greg Williamson.

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.

No more misspellings and low-quality graphics.

Eric O'Neill, author of Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, says any scammer can now run the type of sophisticated long con that used to require massive time investment and specialized skills.

The criminal can launch multiple attacks at once and has a fleet of evil AI agents doing the work for them.

Agents that 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.

These are sometimes called pig-butchering scams because criminals build up trust over a long period before they strike.

Mikey Pruitt at security software firm DNS Filter says the contact often starts on dating apps, then moves to social media or messaging platforms.

Coordination between these various services is crucial to catching these crimes before they happen, says Alice Marwick at Data & Society.