Australia's corporate regulator has put a number on a shift it says is reshaping the scam economy: 19,400 fraudulent websites and advertisements taken down in the 2026 financial year, up 182 per cent on the year before, with generative AI doing much of the heavy lifting.
ASIC's media release 26-195MR warns that scammers are using artificial intelligence to spin what it calls vast webs of deception — synthetic video and cloned voices of well-known Australians, machine-written copy at volume, and genuine licence numbers lifted from real businesses and pasted onto fake investment pitches.
What is confirmed
The takedown figures come from ASIC's own disruption work and are the regulator's own accounting. They measure volume, not harm, and ASIC does not present them as a loss estimate.
The underlying deception is not new. Someone claims to hold an Australian financial services licence, or to be acting for a firm that does. What has changed is the cost of manufacturing the supporting evidence. A convincing on-camera presenter, a cloned voice on a cold call, a polished landing page and a fabricated testimonial can now be produced in an afternoon and varied at almost no cost.
That matters for a specific reason: the old scam tells were production-quality tells. Bad grammar, poor design, an obviously borrowed logo. Generative tools erode most of them at once, which pushes the verification burden back onto the one thing scammers cannot fabricate — the regulator's own records.
The register, not the advertisement
ASIC's instruction to consumers is deliberately unglamorous. Do not check the advertisement, the endorsement or the video. Check the register.
Australian financial services licensees appear on the Australian Financial Services Licensee Register, maintained by ASIC. Credit licensees appear on a separate register, and banned and disqualified persons are listed as well. A licence number printed in a pitch proves nothing on its own, because the numbers are public and can be copied from any licensed firm's website.
The practical checks are narrow: does the entity name on the pitch match the entity name on the register; is the licence current; and is the person you are speaking to actually authorised to give that advice? ASIC's guidance is to contact the firm using details you found independently, never a phone number or link supplied in the pitch itself.
Deepfakes and the celebrity lure
The AI-specific element ASIC highlights is impersonation. Generated video and audio of familiar public figures are being attached to investment pitches to borrow credibility the promoter has not earned. If a well-known Australian appears to be endorsing a trading platform, a crypto product or an advice service, that appearance is a reason to slow down rather than a reason to trust.
The same impersonation pattern shows up beyond finance. The National Anti-Scam Centre has flagged scammers posing as churches and community organisations to solicit gift cards — a low-tech con dressed in trusted branding. The mechanism is identical: borrow a name people already trust, then move the payment onto a channel that cannot be reversed.
Which agency has the file
For fake licence claims and unlicensed financial advice, the file sits with ASIC. Consumer reports on scams more broadly route through the National Anti-Scam Centre, which operates within the ACCC, and Scamwatch. Takedowns themselves are partly ASIC-led and partly platform-mediated, which is why the headline number is a policy output as much as a crime statistic.
Where money has already moved, the bank is the first call, not the regulator.
What is still unknown
ASIC's release does not say how many Australians lost money to AI-assisted licence fraud, how much was lost, or whether any of the FY26 takedowns have produced criminal referrals or charges. It does not break out how much of the 182 per cent rise reflects better detection and reporting rather than a genuinely larger pool of scams — a distinction that matters if you are trying to work out whether the problem is growing or the net is tightening.
It also does not separate fake claims attached to real, existing licence numbers from numbers invented outright. Those are different offences with different evidence trails.
What is actionable now is narrow and cheap. Verify the licence on the register before any transfer. Treat unsolicited contact about investments as hostile until proven otherwise. And if money has already gone, report early — to the bank, then to Scamwatch — because the window for recovery closes fast.