2026 Fraud Trends and Phishing Predictions Report

It’s Bolster AI’s look at how phishing and online fraud have changed and where they’re heading. The 2026 edition covers the shift from isolated scams to large-scale, coordinated operations built on durable infrastructure. Fill in the form on this page to download it.

Four things: how phishing moved from impersonation to infrastructure-driven campaigns, why SEO poisoning and content farms became dominant fraud tactics, the early signals that appear months before a scam reaches scale, and which industries are targeted most and why.

Attackers stopped treating phishing as a single email and started building long-term infrastructure. Bolster AI’s research team tracked more than 11.9 million malicious domains in 2025 tied to phishing, fraud, and misinformation campaigns (https://bolster.ai/blog/2026-phishing-stats). That build-out means registering domains ahead of time, manipulating search results, and harvesting identities at scale, with the visible scam launching later.

SEO poisoning is the practice of ranking fraudulent pages in search results for terms your real customers are searching, so victims arrive through a search engine instead of a link in an email. It works because a search result carries more implied trust than an unsolicited message does.

Because they arrive before the loss does. Domain registrations, certificate issuance, and staged pages often appear months ahead of a campaign going live. A team that can see that build-up has the option to act while the operation is still cheap to disrupt.

Technology, government, and financial services led in 2025, together accounting for nearly 63% of the phishing activity Bolster AI tracked (https://bolster.ai/blog/2026-phishing-stats). Attackers concentrate where impersonation converts fastest, which tends to mean sectors whose customers routinely sign in, transfer money, or enter payment details.

Security leaders, fraud teams, and brand owners who need a current picture of how phishing and impersonation are operating. It’s also useful when you’re building an internal case for external threat protection and need something more recent than last year’s numbers.

A feed gives you indicators to act on today. This report gives you the pattern behind them, which is what you need when you’re setting strategy or budget for the year rather than triaging an incident.

It sets out what the shift toward campaign infrastructure means for defenders, and that points in a consistent direction. Detection has to reach the infrastructure stage rather than waiting for a scam to go live, and coverage has to span the channels a single campaign spreads across.

Request a demo at https://bolster.ai/request-a-demo for a picture of what’s live against your brand across domains, social media, app stores, marketplaces, ads, and the dark web.