Fraud in America has stopped being a slow leak and turned into a flood. It's touching bank accounts, businesses, payroll departments, retirees, college students, city governments, and people who were certain they would never fall for it. The crisis is not that scams exist. The crisis is that we still believe they only happen to someone else.

I have spent my career studying criminals, investigating fraud, and teaching the public how manipulation works long before anyone realizes they are in it. But the threat today is evolving faster than public awareness, corporate training, or public policy. And while we debate markets, elections, and foreign interference, Americans are losing billions to something far quieter, far smarter, and far more personal.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, Americans reported losing $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25% increase from the year prior, and the majority of losses came from imposter scams. That number alone should qualify as a national emergency. And while individual financial loss is devastating, the corporate version can be catastrophic. Business Email Compromise (BEC), one of the most effective and least reported corporate scams, cost organizations $2.9 billion in 2023.

When people hear "scams," they imagine typos, bad grammar, clumsy emails, and poorly designed websites. As scammers often operated from overseas and mass-distributed their schemes, mistakes were their signature. That used to be true, but not anymore. Artificial intelligence erased that weakness. Today,........

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