By James M. Jackson
Old scam, new
potency
A woman in her
seventies picks up the phone. It's her grandson. He's in trouble. There's been
an accident, a lawyer, bail, and he needs money fast, and please, please
don't tell Mom. She knows this scam, but she knows his voice, too. And right
now it’s shaking. She asks questions; he answers. She wires the money.
It wasn't him. It
was a few seconds of his voice lifted from a birthday video on social media and
run through an AI cloning tool by someone she will never meet, in a country
she'll never visit. The answers were shaped by material scraped from his social
media.
I lifted that
updated scenario, in spirit, straight from the FBI's 2025 Internet
Crime Report
(downloadable PDF), published by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3),
which logged more than a million complaints last year and $20.877 billion
in reported losses—up 26% from last year.
Meanwhile, the
violent crimes that populate many of our novels are on the decline. According
to the preliminary FBI report on violent crime (press release here) murder and
manslaughter were down 18.1% last year. Robbery down 18.5%.
We writers can do
a real service for our readers and increase their awareness of how insidious
these crimes are by including them—and the damage they do to their victims—in
our novels and stories. It requires some thought to pull it off.
Oh sure, there’s
plenty of traditional mayhem to populate our standard crime genre tropes if
that’s what we want to write about. But crime is changing and moving rapidly to
financial-driven crimes. My experience is most people think they are too smart
to fall victim to modern hoaxes. Then, of course, they do.
Who the victims
are
Americans sixty
and older reported $7.7 billion in losses last year, up 59% in twelve
months, with an average loss of $38,500. For a retiree, that can mean losing
their house, their savings, their dignity. And these weren't fools. Of the
crypto-fraud victims the FBI proactively notified through one initiative, 78%
had no idea they were being scammed. That same program referred dozens of
victims to specialists for suicide intervention. People don't just lose money
to these crimes. Some of them don't survive the shame.
That’s the
pain we can show through our writing. But we have challenges.
The villain has no
face
Crime fiction
loves a mastermind—the antagonist you can name and chase to a final
confrontation. The 2025 data makes that harder to justify.
The single largest
source of financial loss last year wasn't a heist or a hack. It was
cryptocurrency investment fraud, a slow-burn con the press calls "pig
butchering." They drained $7.2 billion from Americans. It’s not
some super-geek hacker working in his basement (or his parents’ basement). The
FBI reports these operations are largely run by organized criminal enterprises
in Southeast Asia, in compounds across Cambodia, Laos, and Burma, staffed by
victims of human trafficking forced to run the scams.
The person texting
your protagonist sweet nothings about a can't-miss crypto play may themselves
be a prisoner, beaten if they don't hit a quota. It's a victim victimizing a
victim. It’s thriller material for sure, but there’s a pacing problem.
The weapon is
trust, and it's patient
The other significant
shift is from confrontation to confidence. There's no dark alley in these
stories, no struggle, no weapon you could dust for prints. There's just
patience.
Romance and
investment scams are courtships. The "kill" can take months—daily
good-morning texts, shared dreams, a fabricated portfolio that ticks
reassuringly upward until the victim is all the way in. By the time the money's
gone, the relationship feels more real than the people in the next room.
This is a slow
burn—psychological thrillers, maybe? Or maybe it’s backstory that slowly
appears because the immediate call to action is the recovery scam.
The recovery scam
After they rob you,
someone calls offering to help you get your money back—for a fee. The IC3
logged 10,516 of these in 2025, totaling $1.4 billion. The con
that robs you, and the con that robs you again while you're grieving the first
one. Maybe that’s where the fiction good guys can play cat and mouse and spring
the trap. And the good guys have new tools as well.
The deepfake tell
Artificial
intelligence has graduated from gimmick to standard-issue tool. The report
flags 22,364 complaints with an AI nexus and $893 million in
losses. The tools are not just voice clones for those "distress" calls;
they include AI-written scripts that make a romance bot sound like a soulmate,
deepfaked celebrities hawking fake funds.
For those of us
who like to slip an authentic, earned detail into a reveal, the FBI handed us a
gift. In flagged employment-interview scams, investigators noticed the
deepfakes weren't perfect: the speaker's lip movements didn't quite sync with
the audio, and a cough or a sneeze landed a half-second off from the picture.
That's your detective's gotcha—not invented, not a cheat, but a real,
current tell pulled from the field. Use it before everyone else does.
The investigators
get a new clock
And while the
build-up part of the scam takes time, once the money begins to move, the
ticking clock races. The FBI's "Financial Fraud Kill Chain" is a race
against a wire transfer: freeze the funds before they hop from the first bank
to the next account, then overseas, then gone. A few brief hours and minutes
can make the difference between success and failure.
The genre's new
dark
Old fears we trade
in still work. We taught readers to fear the stranger in the dark, the knock at
the door, the figure at the end of the hall. The 2025 numbers suggest the next
thing to fear is gentler and far closer: the friend in your pocket. A grandchild
who calls. The investor who finally understands you. The kind voice
offering to fix everything.
Means is now a
chatbot. Opportunity is a notification. And motive is a quota, set by someone
you'll never catch, in a building full of people who can't leave.
Writers, have you
started tackling these issues in your stories? Readers, will these crimes keep
you up at night (reading books, hopefully, not worrying)?
James
M. Jackson writes justice-driven thrillers with brains
and bite, including the Niki Undercover Thriller series and the Seamus
McCree series. To
learn more information about Jim and his books, check out his website, https://jamesmjackson.com. You
can sign
up for his newsletter (and get to read Low Tide at Tybee, a
novella featuring Seamus, his darts-throwing mother, and six-year-old
granddaughter, Megan).
