Bethany Alvaro 
A new report by Gen has explored the trends surrounding Australia being the “global epicentre” of online scams, finding that despite endless digital literacy and scam awareness campaigns, scams rose by 51 per cent in the latter half of last year.
Of this, e-shopping and online storefront scams remained unsurprisingly high, marked by a 258 per cent increase.
Gen puts this down to social media and video platforms now being major advertising grounds for businesses, with 96 per cent of “social-origin” scams on desktops deriving from Facebook and YouTube.
“In plain terms, the vast majority of risky scam clicks begin in just two places: the social feed and the video loop,” the report said.
“Malvertising” scams, characterised as fake advertising, were also found to be an increasingly prevalent trend within scam networks. Gen’s research found this to be the top cyber scam threat, making up 41 per cent of all attacks.
This aligns with additional internal findings that scam and banned advertising made up 10 per cent of Meta’s total profits, equivalent to about US$16 billion.
“Reports describe billions of scam-related ads per day, with some internal systems rating ads as highly likely to be fraudulent yet allowing them to run,” the report said.
“For ordinary users, the distinction between an ‘ad platform’ and a ‘scam delivery system’ is increasingly academic.”
Gambling (167 per cent), financial (143 per cent), and dating (65 per cent) scams all saw a rise in the latter half of 2025, with artificial intelligence (AI) being a critical driver of these figures.
The report noted that “as AI lowers the cost of persuasion, a single breach can now compound into months of financial and personal risk”.
Gen’s research revealed that highly convincing AI voice and video generation was used in investment, finance, and crypto-based scams. Deepfakes, manipulated media, impersonations, and the reuse of breached data are a handful of the tactics used to create urgency for financial response from scam victims.
“AI made scams more personal, scalable and persistent, amplifying both initial fraud and downstream identity abuse,” the report said.
The full report is available here.