Hyperstructure fraud: $3.7 billion in documented losses, of which 89% since January 2025

A study compiles the incidents verified since 2019: social networks account for 47% of the losses, far from direct identity theft.

The curve is brutal. Global financial losses attributed to synthetic content fraud amount to $3.7 billion according to a compilation of documented incidents. The chronological detail explains everything: 83 million dollars accumulated between 2020 and 2023, 335 million in the year 2024 alone, then 2.5 billion in 2025 and already 764 million in the first half of 2026. The last two years alone account for 89 per cent of the total recorded.

Social networks are the first source of losses, at $1.73 billion, or 47 per cent of the global total. The dominant mechanism is the promotion of false financial investments backed by the cloned image of celebrities or public officials. Identity theft came second at $911 million, a quarter of the losses.

The telephone and video conferencing follow

Other channels remain a minority of value but are diverse: $71 million for telephone calls, $62 million for video platforms and videoconferencing tools, $41 million for couriers and $12 million for e-mail. The study is based on data from the AI Incident Database, Resemble.AI and the OECD, with only those incidents that occurred between January 2019 and March 2026 for which the media documented an established financial loss — the actual figure is, by construction, a floor.