Consumers lost $12.5 billion to fraud last year, and AI-powered scams are set to explode in 2026, Experian warns

A swarm of bots armed with your credit card information sounds like a glaring-red signal to cancel the card. But a swarm of bots with your credit card information—and permission to buy those jeans you’ve been eyeing? Doesn’t sound so bad.

Yet “shopping” with tools like OpenAI or Perplexity could wreak havoc on companies that already struggle to distinguish between so-called good and bad bots, warns Experian in its 2026 Fraud Forecast, published today. The No. 1 threat to companies, according to the forecast...