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As the holiday season ramps up, so do group dinners, shared travel costs, gift exchanges, and all the little moments where someone says, “Just Venmo me.”
With more people sending and splitting money this time of year, scammers know it’s prime time to target payment apps. Here’s how to keep your Venmo transactions safe during one of the busiest — and riskiest — payment seasons.
Venmo scams come in all shapes, and many of them look like variations of email phishing and text scams. The scammers behind them will pose as Venmo customer service reps who ask for your login credentials. Other scammers offer bogus cash prizes and pyramid schemes that lure in victims with the promise of quick cash. Some scammers will use the app itself to impersonate friends and family to steal money.
Venmo has a dedicated web page on the topic of scams, and lists the following as the top Venmo scams out there:
| · Fake Prize or Cash Reward
· Call from Venmo · Call from Tech Support · Fake Payment Confirmation · Pre-payment for Goods and Services |
· Stranger Posing as a Friend
· Payments from Strangers · Offers to Make Money Fast · Paper Check Scam · Romance Scam |
Venmo has thorough instructions to combat these scams and breaks them down in detail on its site. They also provide preventative tips and steps to take if you unfortunately fall victim to one of these scams. Broadly speaking, though, avoiding Venmo scams breaks down into a few straightforward steps.
1) Never share private details.
Scammers often pose as customer service reps to pump info out of their victims. They’ll ask for things like bank account info, debit card or credit card numbers, or even passwords and authentication codes sent to your phone. Never share this info. Legitimate reps from legitimate companies like Venmo won’t request it.
2) Know when Venmo might ask for your Social Security number.
In the U.S., Venmo is regulated by the Treasury Department. As such, Venmo might require your SSN in certain circumstances. Venmo details the cases where they might need your SSN for reporting, here on their website. Note that this is an exception to what we say about sharing SSNs and tax ID numbers. As a payment app, Venmo might have legitimate reasons to request it. However, don’t send this info by email or text (any email or text that asks you to do that is a scam). Instead, always use the mobile app by going to Settings –> Identity Verification.
3) Keep an eye out for scam emails and texts.
Venmo always sends communications through its official “venmo.com” domain name. If you receive an email that claims to be from Venmo but that doesn’t use “venmo.com,” it’s a scam. Never click or tap on links in emails or texts supposedly sent by Venmo.
4) Be suspicious of the messages you get. Imposters are afoot.
Another broad category of scams includes people who aren’t who they say they are. In the case of Venmo, scammers will create imposter accounts that look like they might be a friend or family member but aren’t. If you receive an unexpected and likely urgent-sounding request for payment, contact that person outside the app. See if it’s really them.
5) When sending money, keep an eye open for alerts from the app.
Just recently, Venmo added a new feature, dynamic alerts, which helps protect people when sending money via the “Friends and Family” option. It pops up an alert if the app detects a potentially fraudulent transaction and includes info that describes the level of risk involved. In the cases of highly risky payments, Venmo might decline the transaction altogether. This adds another level of protection to Friends and Family payments, which are non-refundable in cases of fraud. Further, this underscores another important point about using Venmo: only pay people you absolutely know and trust.
Keep your transactions private. Venmo has a social component that can display a transaction between two people and allow others to comment on it. Payment amounts are always secret. Yet you have control over who sees what by adjusting your privacy settings:
This brings up the question, what if the participants in the transaction have different privacy settings? Venmo uses the most restrictive one. So, if you’re paying someone who has their privacy set to “Public” and you have yours set to “Private,” the transaction will indeed be private.
We suggest going private with your account. The less financial information you share, the better. You can set your transactions to private by heading into the Settings of the Venmo app, tapping on Privacy, and then selecting Private.
In short, just because something is designed to be social doesn’t mean it should become a treasure trove of personal data about your spending habits.
Add extra layers of security. Take extra precautions that make it difficult for others to access your Venmo app.
Online protection software like ours offers several additional layers of security when it comes to your safety and finances online.
For starters, it includes Web Protection and Scam Detector that can block malicious and questionable links that might lead you down the road to malware or a phishing scam, such as a phony Venmo link designed to steal your login credentials. It also includes a password manager that creates and stores strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts.
Moreover, it further protects you by locking down your identity online. Transaction Monitoring and Credit Monitoring help you spot any questionable financial activity quickly. And if identity theft unfortunately happens to you, up to $2 million in ID theft coverage & restoration can help you recover quickly.
The post Venmo 101: Making Safer Payments with the App appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Welcome back to another This Week in Scams.
This week, have attacks that take over Androids and iPhones, plus news that Google has gone on the offensive against phishing websites.
First up, a heads-up for iPhone owners.
In the hands of a scammer, “Find My” can quickly turn into “Scam Me.”
Switzerland’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) shared word this week of a new scam that turns the otherwise helpful “Find My” iOS feature into an avenue of attack.
Now, the thought of losing your phone, along with all the important and precious things you have on it, is enough to give you goosebumps. Luckily, the “Find My” can help you track it down and even post a personalized message on the lock screen to help with its return. And that’s where the scam kicks in.
From the NCSC:
When a device is marked as lost, the owner can display a message on the lock screen containing contact details, such as a phone number or email address. This can be very helpful if the finder is honest – but in dishonest hands, the same information can be used to launch a targeted phishing attack.
With that, scammers send a targeted phishing text, as seen in the sample provided by the NCSC below …
What do the scammers want once you tap that link? They request your Apple ID and password, which effectively hands your phone over to them—along with everything on it and everything else that’s associated with your Apple ID.
It’s a scam you can easily avoid. So even if you’re still stuck with a lost phone that’s likely in the hands of a scammer the point of consolation is that, without your ID, the phone is useless to them.
Ignore such messages. The most important rule is Apple will never contact you by text message or email to inform you that a lost device has been found.
Never click on links in unsolicited messages or enter your Apple ID credentials on a linked website.
If you lose your device, act immediately. Enable Lost Mode straight away via the Find My app on another device or at iCloud.com/find. This will lock the device.
Be careful about which contact details you show on your lost device’s lock screen. For example, use a dedicated email address created specifically for this purpose. Never remove the device from your Apple account, as this would disable the Activation Lock.
Make sure your SIM card is protected with a PIN. This simple yet effective measure prevents criminals from gaining access to your phone number.
Now, a different attack aimed at Android owners …
A story shared on Fox this week breaks down how a combination of paid search ads, remote access tools, and social engineering have led to hijacked Android phones.
It starts with a search, where an Android owner looks up a bank, a tech support company, or what have you. Instead of getting a legitimate result, they get a link to a bogus site via paid search results that appear above organic search results. The link, and the page it takes them to, look quite convincing, given the ease with which scammers can spin up ads and sites today. (More on that next.)
Once there, they call a support number and get connected to a phony agent. The agent convinces the victim to download an app that will help the “agent” solve their issue with their account or phone. In fact, the app is a remote access tool that gives control of the phone, and everything on it, to the scammer. That means they can steal passwords, send messages to friends, family, or anyone at all, and even go so far as to lock you out.
Basically, this scam hands over one of your most precious possessions to a scammer.
Skip paid search results for extra security. That’s particularly true when contacting your bank or other companies you’re doing business with. Look for their official website in the organic search results below paid ads. Better yet, contact places like your bank or credit card company by calling the number on the back of your card.
Get a scam detector. A combination of our Scam Detector and Web Protection can call out sketchy links, like the bogus paid links here. They’ll even block malicious sites if you accidentally tap a bad link.
Never download apps from third-party sites outside of the Google Play Store. Google has checks in place to spot malicious apps in its store.
Lastly, never give anyone access to your phone. No bank rep needs it. So if someone on a call asks you to download an app like TeamViewer, AnyDesk, or AirDroid, it’s a scam. Hang up.
Beyond that, you can protect yourself further by installing an app like our McAfee Security: Antivirus VPN. You can pick it up in the Google Play store, which also includes our Scam Detector and Identity Monitoring. You can also get it as part of your McAfee+ protection.
Just Wednesday, Google took a first step toward making the internet safer from bogus sites, per a story filed by National Public Radio.
A lawsuit alleges that a China-based company called “Lighthouse” runs a “Phishing-as-a-Service” operation that outfits scammers with quick and easy tools and templates for creating convincing-looking websites. According to Google’s general counsel, these sites could “compromise between 12.7 and 115 million credit cards in the U.S. alone.”
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, which, of course, has no jurisdiction over a China-based company. The aim, per Google’s counsel, is deterrence. From the article:
“It allows us a legal basis on which to go to other platforms and services and ask for their assistance in taking down different components of this particular illegal infrastructure,” she said, without naming which platforms or services Google might focus on. “Even if we can’t get to the individuals, the idea is to deter the overall infrastructure in some cases.”
We’ll keep an eye on this case as it progresses. And in the meantime, it’s a good reminder to get Scam Detector and Web Protection on all your devices so you don’t get hoodwinked by these increasingly convincing-looking scam sites.
Again, scammers can roll them out so quickly and easily today.
Here’s a quick list of a few stories that caught our eye this week:
Alarmingly realistic deepfake threats now target banks in South Africa
Hyundai data breach exposes 2.7 million Social Security numbers
And that’s it for this week! We’ll see you next Friday with more updates, scam news, and ways you can stay safer out there.
The post This Week in Scams: New Alerts for iPhone and Android Users and a Major Google Crackdown appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Chances are, you have more personal information posted online than you think.
In 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that 1.1 million identity theft complaints were filed, where $12.5 billion was lost to identity theft and fraud overall—a 25% increase over the year prior.
What fuels all this theft and fraud? Easy access to personal information.
Here’s one way you can reduce your chances of identity theft: remove your personal information from the internet.
Scammers and thieves can get a hold of your personal information in several ways, such as information leaked in data breaches, phishing attacks that lure you into handing it over, malware that steals it from your devices, or by purchasing your information on dark web marketplaces, just to name a few.
However, scammers and thieves have other resources and connections to help them commit theft and fraud—data broker sites, places where personal information is posted online for practically anyone to see. This makes removing your info from these sites so important, from both an identity and privacy standpoint.
Data broker sites are massive repositories of personal information that also buy information from other data brokers. As a result, some data brokers have thousands of pieces of data on billions of individuals worldwide.
What kind of data could they have on you? A broker may know how much you paid for your home, your education level, where you’ve lived over the years, who you’ve lived with, your driving record, and possibly your political leanings. A broker could even know your favorite flavor of ice cream and your preferred over-the-counter allergy medicine thanks to information from loyalty cards. They may also have health-related information from fitness apps. The amount of personal information can run that broadly, and that deeply.
With information at this level of detail, it’s no wonder that data brokers rake in an estimated $200 billion worldwide every year.
Your personal information reaches the internet through six main methods, most of which are initiated by activities you perform every day. Understanding these channels can help you make more informed choices about your digital footprint.
When you buy a home, register to vote, get married, or start a business, government agencies create public records that contain your personal details. These records, once stored in filing cabinets, are now digitized, accessible online, and searchable by anyone with an internet connection.
Every photo you post, location you tag, and profile detail you share contributes to your digital presence. Even with privacy settings enabled, social media platforms collect extensive data about your behavior, relationships, and preferences. You may not realize it, but every time you share details with your network, you are training algorithms that analyze and categorize your information.
You create accounts with retailers, healthcare providers, employers, and service companies, trusting them to protect your information. However, when hackers breach these systems, your personal information often ends up for sale on dark web marketplaces, where data brokers can purchase it. The Identity Theft Research Center Annual Data Breach Report revealed that 2024 saw the second-highest number of data compromises in the U.S. since the organization began recording incidents in 2005.
When you browse, shop, or use apps, your online behavior is recorded by tracking pixels, cookies, and software development kits. The data collected—such as your location, device usage, and interests—is packaged and sold to data brokers who combine it with other sources to build a profile of you.
Grocery store cards, coffee shop apps, and airline miles programs offer discounts in exchange for detailed purchasing information. Every transaction gets recorded, analyzed, and often shared with third-party data brokers, who then create detailed lifestyle profiles that are sold to marketing companies.
Data brokers act as the hubs that collect information from the various sources to create comprehensive profiles that may include over 5,000 data points per person. Seemingly separate pieces of information become a detailed digital dossier that reveals intimate details about your life, relationships, health, and financial situation.
Legally, your aggregated information from data brokers is used by advertisers to create targeted ad campaigns. In addition, law enforcement, journalists, and employers may use data brokers because the time-consuming pre-work of assembling your data has largely been done.
Currently, the U.S. has no federal laws that regulate data brokers or require them to remove personal information if requested. Only a few states, such as Nevada, Vermont, and California, have legislation that protects consumers. In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has stricter rules about what information can be collected and what can be done with it.
On the darker side, scammers and thieves use personal information for identity theft and fraud. With enough information, they can create a high-fidelity profile of their victims to open new accounts in their name. For this reason, cleaning up your personal information online makes a great deal of sense.
Understanding which data types pose the greatest threat can help you prioritize your removal efforts. Here are the high-risk personal details you should target first, ranked by their potential for harm.
When prioritizing your personal information removal efforts, focus on combinations of data rather than individual pieces. For example, your name alone poses minimal risk, but your name combined with your address, phone number, and date of birth creates a comprehensive profile that criminals can exploit. Tools such as McAfee Personal Data Cleanup can help you identify and remove these high-risk combinations from data broker sites systematically.
This process takes time and persistence, but services such as McAfee Personal Data Cleanup can continuously monitor for new exposures and manage opt-out requests on your behalf. The key is to first understand the full scope of your online presence before beginning the removal process.
Let’s review some ways you can remove your personal information from data brokers and other sources on the internet.
Once you have found the sites that have your information, the next step is to request to have it removed. You can do this yourself or employ services such as McAfee’s Personal Data Cleanup, which can help manage the removal for you depending on your subscription. It also monitors those sites, so if your info gets posted again, you can request its removal again.
You can request to remove your name from Google search to limit your information from turning up in searches. You can also turn on “Auto Delete” in your privacy settings to ensure your data is deleted regularly. Occasionally deleting your cookies or browsing in incognito mode prevents websites from tracking you. If Google denies your initial request, you can appeal using the same tool, providing more context, documentation, or legal grounds for removal. Google’s troubleshooter tool may explain why your request was denied—either legitimate public interest or newsworthiness—and how to improve your appeal.
It’s important to know that the original content remains on the source website. You’ll still need to contact website owners directly to have your actual content removed. Additionally, the information may still appear in other search engines.
If you have old, inactive accounts that have gone by the wayside such as Myspace or Tumblr, you may want to deactivate or delete them entirely. For social media platforms that you use regularly, such as Facebook and Instagram, consider adjusting your privacy settings to keep your personal information to the bare minimum.
If you’ve ever published articles, written blogs, or created any content online, it is a good time to consider taking them down if they no longer serve a purpose. If you were mentioned or tagged by other people, it is worth requesting them to take down posts with sensitive information.
Another way to tidy up your digital footprint is to delete phone apps you no longer use as hackers are able to track personal information on these and sell it. As a rule, share as little information with apps as possible using your phone’s settings.
After sending your removal request, give the search engine or source website 7 to 10 business days to respond initially, then follow up weekly if needed. If a website owner doesn’t respond within 30 days or refuses your request, you have several escalation options:
For comprehensive guidance on website takedown procedures and your legal rights, visit the FTC’s privacy and security guidance for the most current information on consumer data protection. Direct website contact can be time-consuming, but it’s often effective for removing information from smaller sites that don’t appear on major data broker opt-out lists. Stay persistent, document everything, and remember that you have legal rights to protect your privacy online.
After you’ve cleaned up your data from websites and social platforms, your web browsers may still save personal information such as your browsing history, cookies, autofill data, saved passwords, and even payment methods. Clearing this information and adjusting your privacy settings helps prevent tracking, reduces targeted ads, and limits how much personal data websites can collect about you.
When your home address is publicly available, it can expose you to risks like identity theft, stalking, or targeted scams. Taking steps to remove or mask your address across data broker sites, public records, and even old social media profiles helps protect your privacy, reduce unwanted contact, and keep your personal life more secure.
The cost to remove your personal information from the internet varies, depending on whether you do it yourself or use a professional service. Read the guide below to help you make an informed decision:
Removing your information on your own primarily requires time investment. Expect to spend 20 to 40 hours looking for your information online and submitting removal requests. In terms of financial costs, most data brokers may not charge for opting out, but other expenses could include certified mail fees for formal removal requests—about $3-$8 per letter—and possibly notarization fees for legal documents. In total, this effort can be substantial when dealing with dozens of sites.
Depending on which paid removal and monitoring service you employ, basic plans typically range from $8 to $25 monthly while annual plans, which often provide better value, range from $100 to $600. Premium services that monitor hundreds of data broker sites and provide ongoing removal can cost $1,200-$2,400 annually.
The difference in pricing is driven by several factors. This includes the number of data broker sites to be monitored, which could cover more than 200 sites, and the scope of removal requests which may include basic personal information or comprehensive family protection. The monitoring frequency and additional features such as dark web monitoring, credit protection, and identity restoration support and insurance coverage typically command higher prices.
The upfront cost may seem significant, but continuous monitoring provides essential value. A McAfee survey revealed that 95% of consumers’ personal information ends up on data broker sites without their consent. It is possible that after the successful removal of your information, it may reappear on data broker sites without ongoing monitoring. This makes continuous protection far more cost-effective than repeated one-time cleanups.
Services such as McAfee Personal Data Cleanup can prove invaluable, as it handles the initial removal process, as well as ongoing monitoring to catch when your information resurfaces, saving you time and effort while offering long-term privacy protection.
Aside from the services above, comprehensive protection software can help safeguard your privacy and minimize your exposure to cybercrime with these offerings such as:
So while it may seem like all this rampant collecting and selling of personal information is out of your hands, there’s plenty you can do to take control. With the steps outlined above and strong online protection software at your back, you can keep your personal information more private and secure.
Unlike legitimate data broker sites, the dark web operates outside legal boundaries where takedown requests don’t apply. Rather than trying to remove information that’s already circulating, you can take immediate steps to reduce the potential harm and focus on preventing future exposure. A more effective approach is to treat data breaches as ongoing security issues rather than one-time events.
Both the FTC and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have released guidelines on proactive controls and continuous monitoring. Here are key steps of those recommendations:
As you go about removing your information for the internet, it is important to set realistic expectations. Several factors may limit how completely you can remove personal data from internet sources:
While some states like California have stronger consumer privacy rights, most data removal still depends on voluntary compliance from companies.
Removing your personal information from the internet takes effort, but it’s one of the most effective ways to protect yourself from identity theft and privacy violations. The steps outlined above provide you with a clear roadmap to systematically reduce your online exposure, from opting out of data brokers to tightening your social media privacy settings.
This isn’t a one-time task but an ongoing process that requires regular attention, as new data appears online constantly. Rather than attempting to complete digital erasure, focus on reducing your exposure to the most harmful uses of your personal information. Services like McAfee Personal Data Cleanup can help automate the most time-consuming parts of this process, monitoring high-risk data broker sites and managing removal requests for you.
The post How to Remove Your Personal Information From the Internet appeared first on McAfee Blog.
The value of Bitcoin has had its ups and downs since its inception in 2013, but its recent skyrocket in value has created renewed interest in this virtual currency. The rapid growth of this alternative currency has dominated headlines and ignited a cryptocurrency boom that has consumers everywhere wondering how to get a slice of the Bitcoin pie. For those who want to join the craze without trading traditional currencies like U.S. dollars (i.e., fiat currency), a process called Bitcoin mining is an entry point. However, Bitcoin mining poses a number of security risks that you need to know.
Mining for Bitcoin is like mining for gold—you put in the work and you get your reward. But instead of back-breaking labor, you earn the currency with your time and computer processing power. Miners, as they are called, essentially maintain and secure Bitcoin’s decentralized accounting system. Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a digital ledger called a blockchain. Bitcoin miners update the ledger by downloading a special piece of software that allows them to verify and collect new transactions. Then, they must solve a mathematical puzzle to secure access to add a block of transactions to the chain. In return, they earn Bitcoins, as well as a transaction fee.
As the digital currency has matured, Bitcoin mining has become more challenging. In the beginning, a Bitcoin user could mine on their home computer and earn a good amount of the digital currency, but these days the math problems have become so complicated that it requires a lot of expensive computing power. This is where the risks come in. Since miners need an increasing amount of computer power to earn Bitcoin, some have started compromising public Wi-Fi networks so they can access users’ devices.
One example of this security breach happened at a coffee shop in Buenos Aires, which was infected with malware that caused a 10-second delay when logging in to the cafe’s Wi-Fi network. The malware authors used this time delay to access the users’ laptops for mining. In addition to public Wi-Fi networks, millions of websites are being compromised to access users’ devices for mining. When an attacker loads mining software onto devices without the owner’s permission, it’s called a cryptocurrency mining encounter or cryptojacking.
It’s estimated that 50 out of every 100,000 devices have encountered a cryptocurrency miner. Cryptojacking is a widespread problem and can slow down your device; though, that’s not the worst that can happen. Utility costs are also likely to go through the roof. A device that is cryptojacked could have 100 percent of its resources used for mining, causing the device to overheat, essentially destroying it.
Now that you know a little about mining and the Bitcoin security risks associated with it, here are some tips to keep your devices safe as you monitor the cryptocurrency market:
The post Bitcoin Security: Mining Threats You Need to Know appeared first on McAfee Blog.
We’re standing at the threshold of a new era in cybersecurity threats. While most consumers are still getting familiar with ChatGPT and basic AI chatbots, cybercriminals are already moving to the next frontier: Agentic AI. Unlike the AI tools you may have tried that simply respond to your questions, these new systems can think, plan, and act independently, making them the perfect digital accomplices for sophisticated scammers. The next evolution of cybercrime is here, and it’s learning to think for itself.
The threat is already here and growing rapidly. According to McAfee’s latest State of the Scamiverse report, the average American sees more than 14 scams every day, including an average of 3 deepfake videos. Even more concerning, detected deepfakes surged tenfold globally in the past year, with North America alone experiencing a 1,740% increase.
At McAfee, we’re seeing early warning signs of this shift, and we believe every consumer needs to understand what’s coming. The good news? By learning about these emerging threats now, you can protect yourself before they become widespread.
A new case disclosed by Anthropic, first reported by Axios, marks a turning point: a Chinese state-sponsored group used the company’s Claude Code agent to automate the majority of an espionage campaign across nearly thirty organizations. Attackers allegedly bypassed guardrails through jailbreaking techniques, fed the model fragmented tasks, and convinced it that it was conducting defensive security tests. Once operational, the agent performed reconnaissance, wrote exploit code, harvested credentials, identified high-value databases, created backdoors, and generated documentation of the intrusion. In all, they completed 80–90% of the work without any human involvement.
This is the first publicly documented case of an AI agent running a large-scale intrusion with minimal human direction. It validates our core warning: agentic AI dramatically lowers the barrier to sophisticated attacks and turns what was once weeks of human labor into minutes of autonomous execution. While this case targeted major companies and government entities, the same capabilities can, and likely will, be adapted for consumer-focused scams, identity theft, and social engineering campaigns.
Before we dive into the threats, let’s break down what we’re actually talking about when we discuss AI and its evolution:
Traditional AI: The Helper
The AI most people know today works like a very sophisticated search engine or writing assistant. You ask it a question, it gives you an answer. You request help with a task, it provides suggestions. Think of ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or the AI features on your smartphone. They’re reactive tools that respond to your input but don’t take independent action.
Generative AI: The Creator
Generative AI, which powers many current scams, can create content like emails, images, or even fake videos (deepfakes). This technology has already made scams more convincing by cloning real human voices and eliminating telltale signs like poor grammar and obvious language errors.
The impact is already visible in the data. McAfee Labs found that for just $5 and 10 minutes of setup time, scammers can create powerful, realistic-looking deepfake video and audio scams using readily available tools. What once required experts weeks to produce can now be achieved for less than the cost of a latte—and in less time than it takes to drink it.
Agentic AI: The Independent Actor
Agentic AI represents a fundamental leap forward. These systems can think, make decisions, learn from mistakes, and work together to solve tough problems, just like a team of human experts. Unlike previous AI that waits for your commands, agentic AI can set its own goals, make plans to achieve them, and adapt when circumstances change
Key Characteristics of Agentic AI:
Gartner predicts that by 2028, a third of our interactions with AI will shift from simply typing commands to fully engaging with autonomous agents that can act on their own goals and intentions. Unfortunately, cybercriminals won’t be far behind in exploiting these capabilities.
Think of agentic AI as giving scammers their own team of tireless, intelligent apprentices that never sleep, never make mistakes, and get better at their job every day. Here’s how this digital apprenticeship makes scams exponentially more dangerous.
Traditional scammers spend hours manually researching targets, scrolling through social media profiles, and piecing together personal information. Agentic AI recon agents operate persistently and autonomously, self-prompting questions like “What data do I need to identify a weak point in this organization?” and then collecting it from social media, breach data, exposed APIs and cloud misconfigurations.
Unlike traditional phishing that uses static messages, agentic AI can dynamically update or alter their approach based on a recipient’s response, location, holidays, events, or the target’s interests, marking a significant shift from static attacks to highly adaptive and real-time social engineering threats.
An agentic AI scammer targeting you might start with a LinkedIn message about a job opportunity. If you don’t respond, it switches to an email about a package delivery. If that fails, it tries a text message about suspicious account activity. Each attempt uses lessons learned from your previous reactions, becoming more convincing with every interaction.
AI-generated phishing emails achieve a 54% click-through rate compared to just 12% for their human-crafted counterparts. With agentic AI, scammers can create messages that don’t just look professional, they sound exactly like the people and organizations you trust.
The technology is already sophisticated enough to fool even cautious consumers. As McAfee’s latest research shows, social media users shared over 500,000 deepfakes in 2023 alone. The tools have become so accessible that scammers can now create convincing real-time avatars for video calls, allowing them to impersonate anyone from your boss to your bank representative during live conversations.
Perhaps most concerning is agentic AI’s ability to learn and improve. As the AI interacts with more victims over time, it gathers data on what types of messages or approaches work best for certain demographics, adapting itself and refining future campaigns to make each subsequent attack more powerful, convincing, and effective. This means that every failed scam attempt makes the AI smarter for its next victim. Understanding how agentic AI will transform specific types of scams helps us prepare for what’s coming. Here are the most concerning developments:
Multi-Stage Campaign Orchestration
Agentic AI can potentially orchestrate complex multi-stage social engineering attacks, leveraging data from one interaction to drive the next one. Instead of simple one-and-done phishing emails, expect sophisticated campaigns that unfold over weeks or months.
Automated Spear Phishing at Scale
Traditional spear phishing required manual research and customization for each target. In the new world order, malicious AI agents will autonomously harvest data from social media profiles, craft phishing messages, and tailor them to individual targets without human intervention. This means cybercriminals can now launch thousands of highly personalized attacks simultaneously, each one crafted specifically for its intended victim.
Real-Time Adaptive Attacks
When a target hesitates or questions an initial approach, agents adjust their tactics immediately based on the response. This continuous refinement makes each interaction more convincing than the last, wearing down even skeptical targets through persistence and learning. Traditional red flags like “This seems suspicious” or “Let me verify this” no longer end the attack, they just trigger the AI to try a different approach.
Cross-Platform Coordination
These autonomous systems now independently launch coordinated phishing campaigns across multiple channels simultaneously, operating with an efficiency human attackers cannot match. An agentic AI scammer might contact you via email, text message, phone call, and social media—all as part of a coordinated campaign designed to overwhelm your defenses.
The rise of agentic AI scams requires a fundamental shift in how we think about cybersecurity. Traditional advice like “watch for poor grammar” no longer applies. Here’s what you need to know to protect yourself:
Since agentic AI eliminates traditional warning signs, focus on these behavioral red flags:
High-Priority Warning Signs:
Emotional urgency: Messages designed to make you panic, feel guilty, or act without thinking
Requests for unusual actions: Being asked to do something outside normal procedures
Isolation tactics: Instructions not to tell anyone else or to handle something “confidentially”
Multiple contact attempts: Being contacted through several channels about the same issue
Perfect personalization: Messages that seem to know too much about your specific situation
At McAfee, we understand that fighting AI-powered attacks requires AI-powered defenses. Our security solutions are designed to detect and stop sophisticated scams before they reach you. McAfee’s Scam Detector provides lightning-fast alerts, automatically spotting scams and blocking risky links even if you click them, with all-in-one protection that keeps you safer across text, email, and video. Our AI analyzes incoming messages using advanced pattern recognition that can identify AI-generated content, even when it’s grammatically perfect and highly personalized.
Scam Detector keeps you safer across text, email, and video, providing comprehensive coverage against multi-channel agentic AI campaigns. Beyond analyzing message content, our system evaluates sender behavior patterns, communication timing, and request characteristics that may indicate AI-generated scams. Just as agentic AI attacks learn and evolve, our detection systems continuously improve their ability to identify new threat patterns.
Protecting yourself from agentic AI scams requires combining smart technology with informed human judgment. Security experts believe it’s highly likely that bad actors have already begun weaponizing agentic AI, and the sooner organizations and individuals can build up defenses, train awareness, and invest in stronger security controls, the better they will be equipped to outpace AI-powered adversaries.
We’re entering an era of AI versus AI, where the speed and sophistication of both attacks and defenses will continue to escalate. According to IBM’s 2025 Threat Intelligence Index, threat actors are pursuing bigger, broader campaigns than in the past, partly due to adopting generative AI tools that help them carry out more attacks in less time.
While the threat landscape is evolving rapidly, the combination of human intelligence and AI-powered security tools gives us powerful advantages. Humans excel at recognizing context, understanding emotional manipulation, and making nuanced judgments that AI still struggles with. When combined with AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data and detect subtle patterns, this creates a formidable defense.
The rise of agentic AI represents both a significant threat and an opportunity. While cybercriminals will certainly exploit these technologies to create more sophisticated scams, we’re not defenseless. By understanding how these systems work, recognizing the new threat landscape, and combining human wisdom with AI-powered protection tools like McAfee‘s Scam Detector, we can stay ahead of the threats.
The key insight is that while AI can mimic human communication and behavior with unprecedented accuracy, it still relies on exploiting fundamental human psychology—our desire to help, our fear of consequences, and our tendency to trust. By developing better awareness of these psychological vulnerabilities and implementing verification protocols that don’t depend on technological red flags, we can maintain our security even as the threats become more sophisticated.
Remember: in the age of agentic AI, the most important security tool you have is still your human judgment. Trust your instincts, verify before you act, and never let urgency override prudence, no matter how convincing the request might seem.
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