Impersonation fraud is a scam in which an attacker pretends to be a trusted person or organization to pressure a victim into taking an unsafe action. The impersonation may happen through email, text message, phone calls, social media, or even synthetic audio and video. The goal is usually to steal money, credentials, or sensitive information, or to authorize a transfer or account change.
In cyber security, impersonation fraud matters because trust is often the weakest point in a process. Attackers use familiar names, logos, urgent language, and lookalike domains to make a request seem legitimate. AI can make these scams more convincing by generating polished messages or cloning a voice. Defenses focus on verification: out-of-band confirmation, phishing-resistant authentication, strict payment approval workflows, and user training that emphasizes checking identity instead of trusting appearance alone.