Detections of online scams doubled between July 2025 and June 2026, as cybercriminals focused on more direct ways to generate revenue from victims, according to Akamai.
The security vendor’s latest State of the Internet (SOTI) report features data from partner Bolster AI, revealing that scam activity overtook phishing for the first time.
It recorded around 6.4 million online scams in the period April-June 2026, versus 3.2 million in July-September 2025.
This category typically includes fake stores, investment scams, tech support scams and payment fraud, it said.
“The fight against fraud is no longer just an isolated financial function; it is a critical, cross-functional cybersecurity imperative,” said Patrick Sullivan, CTO, security strategy at Akamai. “As autonomous AI agents and synthetic identities redefine how customers interact with brands, threat actors are exploiting these same vectors to conduct business logic abuse and zero-click data exfiltration.”
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However, phishing – which Akamai defines as attempts to steal credentials, authentication info and data via brand impersonation – also rose during the period.
Phishing detections increased by 61%, driven by reusable phishing kits, industrialized infrastructure, and AI.
The latter has helped to decrease the average phishing attack lifespan by more than 50%, dropping from 48 days (Q4 2025) to 22 days (Q2 2026), the report claimed.
“Adversaries leverage AI to generate dynamic templates, produce multilingual lures at scale, and deploy condition-aware evasion – drastically lowering costs while bypassing legacy defenses,” it explained.
“Conversely, security teams use AI to compress investigation and reduce workflows from days to less than an hour through automated indicator analysis, infrastructure clustering, and evidence collection, disrupting attacks before victims are impacted.”
The Human Impact of Scams
Over 80% of scam victims in the US reported suicidal thoughts following the crime, according to new data from the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) published on October 28.
A large part of this is down to the self-blame and social stigma attached to scams, the ITRC claimed. It also blamed “institutional ghosting" for the mental anguish that victims often feel.
“When general consumer scam victims overcame their shame to seek help, institutions frequently compounded the injury,” it explained. “Nearly nine in 10 general consumer scam victims asked an organization for help and were never contacted, and 67.2% reported that the organizations they contacted ‘made me feel it was my own fault.’”
A lack of support can also leave victims exposed to recovery scams.
“Abandoned by legitimate institutions and desperate to undo the damage, 78.9% of general consumer scam victims (and 90.9% of those experiencing suicidal ideation) paid a fee to a third party who promised to recover their stolen money, fix their credit or catch the scammer – compared to just 6.5% of scam victims who connected with the ITRC,” the report said.