FaceTime scammers pose as banks in rising fraud scheme

A text about suspicious activity can now turn into a FaceTime call with someone who looks and sounds like bank fraud prevention staff. The video call is the trap: once victims are engaged, scammers use the apparent legitimacy of a live conversation to push them toward sharing logins, codes or money.

The Federal Trade Commission said bogus bank fraud warnings were the most common text-message scam reported in 2022, when consumers logged $330 million in losses to fraudulent texts and a median reported loss of $1,000 through the Consumer Sentinel Network. By 2024, impersonation scams were the top fraud reported to the agency, and consumers reported losing nearly $3 billion to impersonators.

Scammers layer false authority on false authority. The FTC said scammers increasingly mix business and government impersonation in a single scheme, moving victims from a fake company representative to a fake bank or official. The FBI warned in 2025 about account-takeover fraud in which criminals impersonate financial institutions through texts, calls and emails to steal credentials and one-time passcodes, and it separately described the 2023 Phantom Hacker scam, which used technology, banking and government impersonators to convince usually older victims that their accounts had been hacked.

The FTC says no government agency will ask you to wire money, and legitimate institutions will not ask you to wire or move money to protect it. If an unexpected text or FaceTime request arrives, do not reply to the message, do not trust caller ID, and do not use the contact information sent by the scammer. Open your bank app or call a number you already know is real, then verify the alert there.