Emotional Scams to Dominate Digital Crime in 2026: Gen Digital

Emotional scams and other four common types of fraud will dominate digital crime during 2026, reports Gen Digital, the global company behind Norton and Avast. The company predicts that cybercrime will be driven by AI, which is advancing faster than human intuition, and identifies web browsers as the primary attack vector.

The acceleration of threat vectors responds to a paradigm shift where malicious actors have ceased reacting to innovation and have begun to dictate it. "Cybercriminals no longer adapt to technology; they direct it. From identity to emotions, including the browser itself, every corner of the internet is becoming a disputed space. Our goal is to prepare people for the reality that lies ahead,” says Sigurdur Stefnisson, Chief Technology Officer, Gen Digital.

Mexico approaches the end of 2025 with a significant rise in digital fraud incidents. During 1Q25, the country saw a 27.06% increase in digital fraud incidents. In the financial sector, digital identity theft grew by 84% during 2024, while hundreds of thousands were harassed and exposed by irregular loan applications through fabrications, defamation, threats, and harassment campaigns.

A distinguishing factor in this cycle is technical sophistication: 70% of these incidents involved components of emotional manipulation or social engineering aided by AI. This environment, where technology automates the exploitation of human vulnerabilities, highlights the imminent fragility of digital trust and traditional authentication systems.

The Evolution of the Threat

Gen Threat Labs breaks down five megatrends that will redefine corporate and personal defense strategies toward 2026.

The first is that humans will need verification. Deception will migrate from asynchronous media to real-time interactions. Generative AI allows for cloning faces, voices, and writing styles in seconds, creating fictional interlocutors that are indistinguishable from real ones. In Mexico, the National Guard registered a 90% increase in impersonation fraud via WhatsApp during 2025.

The evolution toward calls with cloned voices suggests that security protocols must migrate toward strict "human verification." Implementing secondary validation channels and safe words will become necessary to mitigate the risk of deepfakes in corporate and personal communications, says Gen Digital.

Second, Gen Digital warns that 2026 will witness accelerated degradation of information. Content created by AI will be summarized, redistributed, and remixed by other algorithms, creating an ecosystem of noise. For B2B decision-making, distinguishing real data from fabricated content will become increasingly complex. Technology organizations will begin to implement authenticity markers and cryptographic signatures, but mass adoption will likely lag behind the speed of automated disinformation.

The third trend is that emotional scams will dominate digital crime, as phishing and vishing campaigns will no longer follow rigid scripts. Offensive systems now include real-time sentiment analysis, adapting attack vectors based on fear, guilt, anxiety, or enthusiasm detected in the conversation. Gen Digital defines this technique as "AI-assisted emotional engineering." Financial platforms in Mexico already report cases where criminals adjust their speech based on user tone or pauses, increasing fraud effectiveness by simulating authentic human empathy.

Fourth, the creation of synthetic identities — profiles manufactured with AI that include realistic evidentiary documentation — threatens Know Your Customer (KYC) processes. The National Commission for the Protection and Defense of Financial Services Users (CONDUSEF) reports that digital fraud increased 52% in the last two years.

Attacks related to "hybrid identities," which are a mix of real and false data, generated losses exceeding MX$1.5 billion in 2025 (US$83.1 billion), reports Gen Digital. If synthetic identities become the norm, validation controls will be insufficient to distinguish official documents from those generated by AI, says the company.

Finally, the company reports that the browser is becoming the primary battlefield. The web browser became the most attacked environment in the digital ecosystem in 2025, a trend that will expand in 2026. This includes malware that will embed directly into the code of web pages, programmatic ads, and pop-ups, unlike traditional executable downloads.