Your Next Villain Doesn't Own a Gun

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)?

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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).