The Scammers Have Scaled, but Communications Leaders Can Fight Back
5 minute read
I have spent most of my career watching communications technology erase distance. Today, a customer can open an account, approve a payment, or speak with a business on another continent in seconds, without giving a second thought to the infrastructure beneath. That progress has created extraordinary economic value.
Unfortunately, as our communications technology gets more efficient, so do the scammers.
Increasingly, lone wolf scammers are being replaced by (more) organized criminal enterprises. INTERPOL's 2026 Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment describes criminal networks that trade phishing kits across regions, operate scam centers in other countries, and use separate money-laundering networks to cash out their ill-gotten gains.
Global financial fraud losses are estimated at $442 billion in 2025, and INTERPOL says it expects significant escalation over the next three to five years. In a separate survey of 46,000 adults across 42 markets, the Global Anti Scam Alliance found that 57% had encountered a scam during the previous year, and 23% had lost money. Fraud is having a measurable impact on the digital economy.
Artificial intelligence has reduced the time and effort required to commit deception; messages can be translated, personalized, and made legitimate with a simple GPT prompt, then repeated a thousandfold. These scams have evolved past the awkward grammar and strange phrasing that once made it easy to identify sketchy emails and texts.
INTERPOL estimates that artificial intelligence-enhanced financial fraud can be 4.5 times more profitable. The technology lets criminals reach more people while making each interaction more convincing.
And while we can and should teach people to pause before clicking a link, question an urgent request, or verify an unfamiliar caller, building awareness isn't enough when attacks are automated, bespoke, and designed to be indistinguishable from legitimate communications from a trusted person or brand.
When your phone rings and you see “unknown caller” on the screen, or you get a text with a link, skepticism creeps in.
Fraud undermines the confidence that allows digital commerce to move quickly, and that's why it's becoming as much a growth issue as a security issue. Every business wants to create a customer journey with less friction, but the risk of fraud can make customers hesitate.
Skepticism is simultaneously necessary and a growing obstacle in the digital economy. It can get in the way of a purchase, delay a payment, or prevent a customer from answering an important call.
Hiya's 2026 survey of more than 12,000 consumers across six countries found that 86% of calls from unknown numbers go unanswered. An earlier TransUnion study found that 72% of United States consumers had declined a call because of safety or fraud concerns and later learned, at least some of the time, that they had missed a call they wanted or needed. The total economic cost of fraud extends far beyond money lost to scams.
This spillover is especially punishing for brands because customers will associate the experience with the company being impersonated, even when the company itself did nothing wrong. A 2026 Clutch survey found that 54% of consumers said their trust in a brand decreased after encountering a scam involving it, even when the company was not directly at fault. The criminal borrowed the brand's credibility, and the brand inherited the damage.
The effect on loyalty can be severe: In a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Proximus Global, 68% of surveyed fraud victims stopped using or purchasing from the associated brand. Business leaders can point out after the fact that a fake advertisement ran on another platform or the caller identification was spoofed, but this rarely restores customer confidence. Trust is emotional before it is contractual, and a blameless brand can still suffer from the blowback.
Make no mistake, fraud is a customer experience problem and, ultimately, a growth problem.
A communications provider can't solve the fraud problem alone. No one can. Banks, merchants, technology platforms, telecommunications operators, governments, and law enforcement all see different parts of the same system. The response has to connect those signals, adapt quickly, and work across borders because the fraud industry already does.
Businesses have spent decades optimizing reachability, but now we also have to optimize believability. The customer needs a credible reason to trust that the call, message, link, or payment request really came from the company whose name appears on it.
Our job is to make the communications layer more useful in establishing trust, detecting suspicious patterns, and protecting legitimate interactions, all without turning every ordinary transaction into an obstacle course.
We see these changes firsthand in 8x8's Communications business. Authentication and fraud prevention once felt adjacent to communications, but now, they're a core part of it.
At 8x8, this is one reason we are investing beyond just delivering calls and messages. Across our platform and partner ecosystem, capabilities such as branded caller identification and spam remediation can help a legitimate business establish its identity before the customer answers. Branded calling is not a cure for fraud, but it restores a signal that anonymous calling has lost. It helps the customer answer the other half of the identity question: Is this really the business?
The same principle applies across digital channels. Companies should make legitimate communications easy to recognize, offer clear ways to verify them, monitor for impersonation, and respond quickly when abuse occurs.
Fraud attempts create uncertainty. Uncertainty changes behavior, and changing behavior adds friction to legitimate transactions. This weakens growth, customer experience, and brand loyalty.
Businesses have to learn how to protect confidence in the interaction itself by building in modern authentication, network intelligence, and verified business identity.
I would welcome your perspective on these topics. Where has customer doubt become visible in your business? Are people abandoning transactions, ignoring legitimate outreach, or moving to more expensive channels because they no longer trust the first one? And where can stronger identity and better communications remove risk without adding another burden for the customer?
CEO, 8x8
Samuel Wilson is Chief Executive Officer at 8x8, bringing 25+ years of experience across finance, investment management, and sales, plus deep company leadership spanning Chief Financial Officer, Chief Customer Officer, and go-to-market roles to drive disciplined growth and customer outcomes.
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