Pavan Kushwaha, Founder & CEO at Threatcop & Kratikal, states that phishing has evolved, and AI is the reason you can’t spot it.
The most risky phishing attacks today don’t look suspicious anymore; they look familiar. An email from your manager asking for urgent action. A voice message that sounds exactly like a trusted colleague. A customer query written in flawless language, referencing real events. Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed phishing into a hyper-real threat, removing the obvious signs people once relied on to stay safe.
Cybercriminals have always relied on deception, but AI has elevated phishing from crude trickery to precision engineering. Phishing is the most common form of cybercrime today, with an estimated 3.4 billion spam emails sent every single day. While phishing itself is not new, its scale and sophistication have changed dramatically. Leading threat analysts report explosive growth in phishing volume driven by AI, with one recent report noting a 1,265% surge in phishing attacks linked directly to generative AI trends.
Red Flags are Disappearing
Traditional phishing emails often featured poor grammar, mismatched logos, and awkward formatting, making them easily identifiable. AI has erased those red flags. Modern scam emails are clean, professional, and visually identical to legitimate corporate communication. They use proper spacing, neutral colour schemes, accurate logos, and industry-standard greetings.
AI models can analyse thousands of real emails from a target organisation and reproduce their tone, sentence structure, and branding within seconds. Instead of clumsy copy-paste jobs, attackers now generate messages that look like they came straight from a company’s communications team. This is why recipients often don’t hesitate and fall prey to dubious emails or links.
This is especially risky in B2B environments, where employees are accustomed to formal requests, deadlines, and document sharing. When an email closely resembles genuine internal communication, identifying it as fraudulent becomes exceptionally challenging.
Fraudulent Links that Appear Legitimate
One of the most effective AI-enabled tactics is link disguise. Scam emails often contain links that appear to be PDFs, invoices, or document previews. The file name appears legitimate, follows corporate naming conventions, and even includes realistic reference numbers. But hovering over the link reveals a different story: an unrelated domain designed to steal credentials or deploy malware. AI helps attackers generate URLs, file names, and landing pages that look routine enough to click without hesitation. According to a survey, over 70% of those surveyed consider that phishing attempts have become more successful due to AI.
Entire Websites, Ads, and Support Channels can be faked
AI doesn’t stop at emails or communication. Criminals now replicate entire websites, including navigation menus, authorised partner badges, and customer service scripts. These sites are often promoted through paid search ads, appearing at the top of results and lending further credibility.
Within the recent few years, several fraud cases featured AI-created fake banking pages that deceived tech-savvy individuals. Some scams use AI-created customer service chatbots that pretend to be real customer service representatives by responding immediately, using proper terms, and walking the user step by step on how they can reveal their sensitive information.
Voice-Based Impersonation is the Next Frontier
Perhaps the most unsettling development is AI-powered voice phishing. They could now use short clips of voices from social media sites or public videos to clone voices that imitate tone, pace, and even inflexion of emotions.
There are already instances where the employees transferred funds based on the calls that were generated by AI with convincing voices like that of their CEO or head of finance.
How to protect yourself in an AI-phishing era?
While AI-driven scams are more convincing than ever, they are not unstoppable. Staying safe starts with carefully inspecting sender addresses and URLs, even when messages appear legitimate at first glance. Avoid clicking on unexpected links or opening attachments, especially files you did not request. Be alert to context mismatches, such as requests that do not align with your role, usual workflows, or timing. Always verify sensitive or urgent requests through known, trusted channels, including official phone numbers or verified contacts, rather than replying directly to the message.
End words
If you become a victim of an AI-driven phishing attack, swift action is critical. Immediately change passwords for affected accounts, enable multifactor authentication and passkeys wherever possible, closely monitor financial activity, and notify your bank or service provider. AI has transformed phishing into a far more dangerous and deceptive threat. Scams are no longer easy to spot. They are familiar, polished, and engineered to exploit trust by impersonating brands, colleagues, and even human voices with unsettling accuracy. In this new reality, awareness alone is insufficient; consistent verification and robust security controls are essential. AI phishing feels “too real” precisely because it is designed to be and recognising this shift is the first step toward defending against it.