Online Scam Detections Double, Surpassing Phishing Volume
Akamai's latest research reveals a significant surge in online scam detections, which have doubled to exceed six million, now surpassing phishing attempts in volume.
Cybercriminals are increasingly shifting their focus towards more direct revenue-generating schemes, leading to a dramatic surge in online scam detections. Akamai's latest State of the Internet (SOTI) report, which incorporates data from partner Bolster AI, indicates that scam activity has doubled between July 2025 and June 2026, for the first time overtaking phishing attempts in sheer volume.
The report recorded approximately 6.4 million online scams detected during the April-June 2026 quarter, a stark increase from the 3.2 million detected in the July-September 2025 quarter. This category of fraudulent activity typically encompasses a wide range of threats, including fake online stores, investment scams, tech support scams, and various forms of payment fraud.
Patrick Sullivan, CTO of security strategy at Akamai, emphasized the evolving nature of fraud. "The fight against fraud is no longer just an isolated financial function; it is a critical, cross-functional cybersecurity imperative," Sullivan stated. He further noted that "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."
Despite the rise in scams, phishing attempts—defined by Akamai as efforts to steal credentials, authentication information, and data through brand impersonation—also saw an increase. Phishing detections rose by 61%, fueled by the proliferation of reusable phishing kits, industrialized attack infrastructure, and the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence. AI has significantly reduced the average lifespan of a phishing attack, decreasing it by over 50% from 48 days in Q4 2025 to just 22 days in Q2 2026.
"Adversaries leverage AI to generate dynamic templates, produce multilingual lures at scale, and deploy condition-aware evasion – drastically lowering costs while bypassing legacy defenses," the report explained. Conversely, security teams are also adopting AI to enhance their defenses, compressing investigation and response workflows from days to less than an hour through automated analysis, infrastructure clustering, and evidence collection, thereby disrupting attacks before victims are impacted.
The human toll of these scams is also a significant concern. New data from the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reveals that over 80% of scam victims in the US reported suicidal thoughts following their victimization. This severe psychological impact is attributed to self-blame and social stigma, exacerbated by what the ITRC terms "institutional ghosting"—where victims seeking help from organizations are often ignored or made to feel responsible for their predicament.
This lack of support can leave victims vulnerable to further exploitation by recovery scams. The ITRC report found that a staggering 78.9% of general consumer scam victims, and 90.9% of those experiencing suicidal ideation, paid a fee to a third party promising to recover their stolen money, fix their credit, or catch the scammer. This contrasts sharply with the 6.5% of scam victims who connected with the ITRC for assistance.
The findings underscore a critical shift in the threat landscape, where increasingly sophisticated and direct scamming operations are posing a greater volume of risk to individuals than traditional credential-stealing phishing attacks. The dual-use nature of AI in both attack and defense strategies highlights the ongoing arms race in cybersecurity.