TLDR: Christine Foster, Experian’s General Manager for its GenAI Center of Expertise, highlights the escalating threat of AI-powered cybercrime, noting a significant increase in AI-related fraud from 23% in 2024 to 35% in early 2025. She stresses that while businesses are increasing fraud prevention budgets and adopting AI, these efforts must be underpinned by high-quality data, robust technologies, internal expertise, and strong governance frameworks to effectively counter the democratized cybercrime landscape.
Christine Foster, the General Manager for Experian’s GenAI Center of Expertise, has issued a stark warning regarding the escalating threat of AI-powered cybercrime, emphasizing that generative AI has significantly empowered fraudsters. According to Experian’s latest UK Fraud and FinCrime report, AI-related fraud has seen a dramatic surge, climbing from 23% in 2024 to 35% in early 2025, underscoring the rapid evolution of this insidious threat.
Foster notes that while cybercriminals have always been agile and imaginative, generative AI has amplified their capabilities, enabling them to create convincing scams, forge deepfake identities, and evade detection with unprecedented speed and scale. This technological shift, she argues, has effectively “democratised cybercrime.”
In response to this growing menace, British businesses are not standing idly by. The report indicates that an encouraging 68% of UK businesses plan to increase their fraud prevention budgets in the coming year, and more than half are actively investing in enhancing their AI and machine learning capabilities for fraud detection and prevention. This demonstrates a clear commitment from organizations to take the threat seriously and focus on critical areas of defense.
However, Foster cautions that these investments, while crucial, will yield little without being supported by high-quality data. She asserts that as AI-powered tools become a standard component of the criminal toolkit, companies must fortify their defenses by implementing equally advanced and adaptive AI solutions. These solutions, she explains, must be backed by the right technologies, cultivate internal expertise, and operate within robust governance frameworks.
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Foster also highlighted the dual benefits of employing AI in defense: it improves accuracy in catching fraudulent activity early and significantly reduces false positives. By minimizing incorrect flags, AI allows fraud teams to concentrate their efforts on genuinely fraudulent cases, thereby ensuring legitimate customers are not inconvenienced by mistaken investigations.
