Fake bank texts cost Americans $68 billion in 2025, campaign warns

According to WXYZ-TV, a text or email warning of suspicious activity on a bank account looks legitimate enough that the urge to click is immediate. The message is often not from the bank at all. It is a scammer, and the American Bankers Association's "Banks Never Ask That" campaign exists to help people tell the difference.

The scale behind that warning comes from a joint study by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance on 2025 financial scams, cited by Paul Benda, Executive Vice President for Risk, Fraud and Cybersecurity at the American Bankers Association. Scammers stole $68 billion from Americans in 2025, roughly $186 million a day, affecting about 15 million U.S. adults. Twelve percent of successful scams that year involved artificial intelligence or deepfakes.

Typos are no longer the tell

Benda's point is that the old advice is going stale. Consumers have been told for years to watch for strange wording or spelling mistakes in a suspicious message. Criminals are now using AI to build fraudulent websites and emails that read exactly like a real bank communication. Some use deepfakes to imitate a person's voice or face. The signal that used to give a scam away is disappearing, so the warning sign has to move from how a message looks to what it is asking a person to do.

A message asking for a click, a code, or a callback is suspicious regardless of how polished it looks, because a bank does not operate that way in the first place. The quality of the forgery stopped being a reliable test the moment AI became cheap enough for scammers to use it too.

What consumers said

Detroit resident Brandon Jackson said he mostly ignores texts claiming to be from his bank. Domenique Wood, visiting metro Detroit from New Jersey, said she has accidentally clicked suspicious links, including at work. Gautam Bogg, visiting from Philadelphia, said he was not surprised scam attempts have become more common, noting that criminals "have probably gotten smarter over the past couple of years."

Where the campaign points people

The updated "Banks Never Ask That" site covers five categories: email scams, text scams, phone scams, AI and deepfake scams, and payment app scams. It includes a Scam Slayer Quiz to test a person's ability to spot a suspicious message, along with guidance on strengthening an online bank account and reminders to hang up, delete suspicious messages, and block scam contacts. Check fraud resources are available too.

Flggd tracks this same shift automatically: not whether one message looks convincing, but whether the request behind it matches how a real bank ever behaves.