Artificial intelligence has greatly reduced obstacles for hackers, allowing for more complex and convincing fraud schemes, according to Microsoft’s most recent Cyber Signals study. Microsoft prevented almost 1.6 million bot signup attempts per hour between April 2024 and April 2025, denied 49,000 fake partnership enrollments, and stopped $4 billion in fraud efforts.
E-commerce fraud: AI creates convincing fake storefronts in minutes
Instead of taking days or weeks, fraudsters can now develop plausible e-commerce websites in a matter of minutes thanks to AI algorithms. These websites replicate real companies using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated product descriptions, photos, and phony customer reviews. AI-powered customer support chatbots provide another degree of deceit, communicating with customers and prolonging complaints with prepared explanations to postpone chargebacks.
According to Microsoft, China and Germany are the main sources of this AI-powered fraud, with the latter being singled out because it is one of the EU’s biggest e-commerce marketplaces. Microsoft has integrated fraud detection mechanisms into several of its products, such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Edge, which offer deep learning-based domain impersonation detection and typo protection for websites, in order to counter these attacks.
Job scams: AI powers fake interviews and employment offers
Because generative AI makes it possible for criminals to fabricate job postings, steal credentials, and send out AI-powered email campaigns to job searchers, employment theft has changed. Through automated communication and AI-powered interviews, these frauds can seem genuine, making it more challenging to spot bogus offers.
Unsolicited employment offers that appear too good to be true, demands for personal information, such as bank account information, and offers that promise big compensation for little credentials are all warning indicators. Microsoft warns job searchers to be cautious of emails from free domains instead of legitimate corporate email addresses and to confirm the credibility of employers by cross-referencing company information on official websites and networks like LinkedIn.
Tech support fraud: AI enhances social engineering attacks
Microsoft has seen financially motivated gangs like Storm-1811 impersonate IT help with voice phishing in order to get victims’ devices through genuine features like Windows Quick Assist, even if other tech support schemes do not yet use AI. AI tools can expedite the collection and organization of information about targeted victims to create more credible social engineering lures.
As a result, Microsoft bans 4,415 questionable Quick Assist connection attempts on average every day, which is equivalent to 5.46% of all connection attempts worldwide. The business has created a Digital Fingerprinting feature that uses AI and machine learning to identify and stop fraud, and it has added warning messages to Quick Assist to notify customers about potential frauds before they provide access to their devices.
Through its Secure Future Initiative, Microsoft is proactively preventing fraud. The business implemented a new policy in January 2025 that mandates product teams do fraud prevention assessments and include fraud controls into their design process. In an effort to work with governments, law enforcement, and other groups to shield consumers against frauds, Microsoft has also joined the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.
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