Bitdefender has released its 2026 Global Scam Intelligence Report, offering a comprehensive analysis of the scam landscape over the past year. The report shows how online scams have evolved into a highly sophisticated, cross-platform criminal enterprise, detailing the tactics, channels, and behavioral patterns fraudsters use to target consumers across digital environments worldwide.
Online scams and fraud continue to escalate at an alarming rate. Losses due to scams globally have reached nearly half a billion US dollars in 2025 alone. Bitdefender’s independent global survey of 7,000 consumers reinforces the severity of the problem with 1 in 7 (14%) reporting falling victim to a scam in the past year, a finding that confirms scams as not merely a cybersecurity issue, but a serious threat to consumers’ financial security and digital identity.
The Bitdefender 2026 Global Scam Intelligence Report is built from real-time insights spanning trillions of URLs, billions of messages, live ad ecosystems, call honeypots, and direct consumer submissions. This telemetry captures scam activity as it happens, tracking campaigns across platforms and documenting attacker behavior in motion. The result is a field report that gives both consumers and the security community a comprehensive, data-driven view of how scams operate at scale.
Key findings include:
- Younger generation is highly targeted – Younger consumers are now twice as likely to fall victim to scams as older generations, with a victimization rate of 20% compared to 9.7% among those 55 and older. Scammers have followed their audience to the social platforms, gaming environments, and messaging apps where younger users spend the most time.
- 1 in 20 text messages shows signs of fraud – Extensive analysis of SMS traffic found that 5.2% of all messages analyzed (roughly 1 in 20) exhibited characteristics consistent with scam infrastructure or coordinated fraud activity. For a communication channel people inherently trust, that exposure rate is a serious cause for concern.
- Voice calls remain a high-yield fraud channel – Bitdefender analyzed nearly 150 million incoming calls during the reporting period. More than 23 million were classified as unwanted, meaning about 1 in 6 calls reaching protected devices was deemed fraudulent or unsolicited. The system processed more than 52 million unique phone numbers, with over half a million flagged as unwanted.
- Finance scams dominate across every channel – Investment fraud, banking phishing, and crypto-themed scams appear consistently across SMS, social ads, WhatsApp, voice calls, and email. The lure changes with the platform, but the objective remains constant: quickly move the victim toward a financial decision before skepticism has a chance to intervene.
“The rapid growth and sophistication of online scams has made it increasingly difficult for consumers to protect their digital lives,” said Ciprian Istrate, senior vice president of operations, Consumer Solutions Group at Bitdefender. “While the term ‘scam’ may sound harmless, the consequences are anything but — often resulting in identity theft, financial loss, and data exposure. This report reflects our ongoing commitment to understanding threats at a global scale, and to ensuring our customers have the intelligence and tools they need to stay protected as the threat landscape continues to evolve.”
Download a complimentary copy of the Bitdefender 2026 Global Scam Intelligence Report here.
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