Fraud Losses Hit $579 Billion, and Nasdaq's CEO Wants a National Plan

Fraud losses reached $579.4 billion in 2025. Scam-related losses added roughly $62 billion on top of that. Those figures come from Nasdaq Verafin's 2026 Global Financial Crime Report, and they anchor an increasingly blunt argument from one of Wall Street's most senior executives: the financial system cannot fight this alone.

Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman proposed a National Fraud Strategy at an American Banker event on Tuesday. Her pitch: coordinate banks, technology companies, telecommunications providers, payment networks and law enforcement through information sharing, common best practices and legal safe harbors — so criminals get disrupted earlier and victims stop authorizing fraudulent payments in the first place.

"This challenge is simply too large and evolving too quickly for any single institution to solve alone," Friedman said.

Why now? Because AI changed the math for criminals

The core problem isn't just volume. It's acceleration. Criminals now use artificial intelligence to scale and refine attacks, and that has rewritten the economics of fraud from the attacker's side.

"AI is starting to drive more scale, changing the economics of fraud from a criminal perspective," said Greg Williamson, head of fraud commercialization strategy at Nasdaq Verafin, which works with 2,800 financial institutions across North America.

In practice, that means criminals automate attacks and personalize scams to reach more victims at lower cost.

The attack surface has shifted too. As banks hardened their defenses, fraudsters stopped trying to break through security controls. Instead, they now manipulate consumers directly — convincing victims to hand over credentials or authorize payments themselves.

"There's a shift to scams with some sort of emotional plea — whether that's love or fear," Williamson said.

Scammers build these schemes from publicly available information about victims' relationships, finances and families. The entry points vary:

• Fake online listings
• Romance scams
• Fraudulent investments
• Impersonation attempts on social media and other platforms

One development Williamson flagged as particularly concerning: fraud-as-a-service tools let criminals outsource parts of their operations to specialists. That lowers the barrier to entry for anyone who wants to launch a scam operation without building the infrastructure themselves.

In plain words: attacking consumers is now cheaper, faster and more turnkey than attacking banks.

What would a National Fraud Strategy actually do?

Friedman's framework would connect financial institutions with technology platforms, telecommunications providers, payment networks and law enforcement. The idea builds on existing public- and private-sector initiatives, and it could complement the nation's anti-money laundering and countering-the-financing-of-terrorism framework — which the administration is already working to modernize.

The hard part is translating coordination into practice. Two questions will decide whether the strategy works: how organizations can share information responsibly, and how they can intervene before the money moves and disappears.

Williamson argues earlier intervention is the leverage point. A coordinated response needs to follow a scam across its full life cycle — from the first contact with a victim to the movement of the funds — because gaps between institutions are exactly where criminals operate.

A national strategy could close those gaps. Whether Washington moves fast enough to match attackers armed with AI is the open question the $579 billion number now puts on the table.