October 21, 2025
97% of Consumers Say Fraud Protection Is Their Top Priority in Choosing a Bank
Americans are growing uneasy about how fast artificial intelligence is being used to deceive them. From fake voices to phony bank reps, scams powered by AI are becoming so convincing that even cautious consumers are falling for them.
A new study from Alloy, a fraud prevention platform, shows that 85% of Americans worry AI is making scams harder to detect. The 2025 State of Scams Report, based on a Harris Poll survey of 2,000 people, finds that AI is not only changing how criminals operate but also what people expect from their banks.
Both Emotional and Financial Loss
Sixty percent of respondents said they’re more likely to choose a financial institution that uses AI for security. Nearly everyone (97%) said fraud protection is the single most important factor when picking where to bank.
Those fears are usually grounded in real-life experiences. Sixty-two percent of people said they’ve either been scammed or know someone who has. More than 20% reported losing money to a financial scam, and 21% of those victims lost over $5,000. Emotional fallout is a big factor: almost 30% said the stress of being scammed hit harder than the financial loss itself.
AI-driven bank impersonations top the list of worries (28%), followed by voice cloning calls (21%) and synthetic identity fraud (18%). These scams are becoming so realistic that even tech-savvy users can’t always tell the difference.
Trading Less Privacy for More Security
With fraud becoming harder to spot, people are also changing the way they view privacy and responsibility. About 69% said they’d give up some privacy for stronger AI protections.
Over 60% believe banks should reimburse scam losses, even when customers authorised the transactions. That view is strongest among Gen Z and Millennials, 73% of whom said banks should step in, compared with 62% of Gen X and Boomers.
The sense of risk goes beyond individual losses, since 87% of consumers said they’d lose trust in their bank if it failed to notify them about an attempted scam.
These concerns echo broader findings from the Aspen Institute, which recently reported that most Americans receive scam messages or calls at least weekly. More than 50 million adults have already lost money to online fraud.
Another recent research revealed that 30% of companies reported annual losses of up to $1 million linked to AI-driven scams as fraudsters execute more sophisticated attacks each time.
