Trend Micro released its 2026 Consumer Security Predictions Report on December 3, 2025. It warns that scams will reach unprecedented scale as fraudsters combine automation, AI-generated personas, voice cloning and deepfake media with emotional manipulation. The report expects multi-channel scam journeys to become the dominant pattern in 2…
Trend Micro published research (Unmasking Task Scams) on task scams, a fast-growing fraud model in which fake online job offers lure victims into repetitive, gamified digital tasks and then extract funds through escalating deposit demands. Operators impersonate legitimate staffing firms and digital marketing agencies and use SMS, WhatsApp…
Scammers are exploiting the annual Medicare Open Enrollment period (October 15 to December 7) as a pretext to impersonate insurers, agencies or Medicare itself. Contact comes by phone, SMS, email, social media and malicious Google ads that lead to spoofed, official-looking websites. Lures include plan changes, card replacement, lower prem…
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened a rulemaking in September asking whether platforms should be required to stop impersonation scam ads from reaching consumers, citing ad tools that generate copy, images and video and optimize targeting regardless of whether an ad is legitimate. The article reports that nearly one trillion scam …
The European Commission has opened a formal investigation under the Digital Services Act (DSA) into Booking.com, a very large online platform with more than 45 million EU users. It will examine whether the company does enough to stop fraudsters from using the platform for fake listings, impersonation fraud, phishing and smishing (theregis…