San Francisco, CA: March 9, 2026 – Impersonation is now one of the costliest forms of consumer fraud. The US Federal Trade Commission's data indicates that consumers reported losing nearly USD 1 billion to business impersonators in 2025, up from USD 866 million in 2024. Separate analysis by Surfshark estimated that deepfake-related scams cost victims around USD 1.1 billion worldwide in 2025, roughly three times the 2024 figure.
AI has lowered the cost of producing convincing fakes: cloned websites, synthetic voices, fabricated endorsements and thousands of near-identical social profiles can now be generated in minutes.
Brand protection teams are responding by moving from periodic sweeps to always-on monitoring, by widening scope from counterfeit goods to impersonation of executives and customer-service channels, and by measuring results on time-to-removal and recovered revenue rather than on the number of reports filed.
“The question is no longer whether a brand will be impersonated, but how many minutes it takes to find and remove the fake,” says Marcus Whitfield, cybersecurity and digital risk intelligence expert at MarkScout.
MarkScout's programs combine automated detection with analyst review so that high-confidence cases are enforced immediately while ambiguous ones are escalated with the evidence already assembled.