Uri Rivner was monitoring scam activity on a Thursday in mid-February when he says an unusual flurry of attacks caught his eye.
Fraudsters impersonating banks were calling up customers, trying to convince them to reveal enough personal information to allow the criminals to hack into deposit accounts. On the surface, this was not unusual at all. Banks and consumers are regularly fighting off these types of schemes, and they are the kind of scam that Rivner sees daily as the CEO and co-founder of Refine Intelligence, which makes software that helps banks prevent fraud.
But this one stood out, both in its size and its strategy. Rivner says that by the end of the day, the banks he was tracking experienced a 1,700% spike in attacks. And instead of pretending to be representatives of the largest U.S. institutions, he says scammers were taking aim at smaller lenders. Half of the banks targeted, he says, had less than $3 billion in total assets.
“What we noticed is an explosion of bank impersonation attacks against regional banks and small community banks,” says Rivner.
These scams also appeared to incorporate AI tools in ways that some fraud experts have warned about, including those in our 2026 banking predictions article.
‘The Scale Is Beginning to Be Alarming’
Small banks certainly haven’t been immune from fraudsters in years past. In fact, U.S. News highlighted one particularly sophisticated scam that targeted a customer of a Massachusetts community bank last year.
But many scammers have been more inclined to take aim at customers of the largest U.S. banks. That’s because the criminals often don’t actually know where you bank. Instead, they may send out a text to thousands of individuals, alerting them to a supposed problem with their Chase or Bank of America account. It’s a shotgun approach, with scammers playing the odds that a significant portion of those receiving the message will have an account with one of those banks.
As fraudsters might joke, that’s why it’s called phishing and not cashing.
“Before, the attacks were very blunt-force attacks where they cast a wide net,” says Scott Anchin, senior vice president of strategic initiatives and policy for the Independent Community Bankers of America. “It wasn’t very targeted, and communications were filled with grammatical errors and targeting errors. But now, because they have access to AI and other tools, they can target customers much more accurately, they can obviously impersonate other people, and they can do it at scale.”
[Read: Best Savings Accounts.]
Scammers have started deploying AI agents on web searches, asking them to scour both leaked data and publicly available documents to compile a list of customers of a specific bank, fraud experts say. That makes attacks on smaller banks much more fruitful for the characters banks call “bad actors.”
Rivner says that’s what appeared to have happened in the attacks he was monitoring. “We’d heard about similar attacks starting six months ago,” he says. “Now the scale is beginning to be alarming.”
Rivner spoke with officials from some of the banks targeted to develop a clearer picture of how the attempted scams unfolded. He says after scammers had identified customers of a bank, the next step was to call them. All at once.
He surmises that this was a calculated approach intended to overwhelm a bank’s capacity to respond. In the past, a small group of scammers might run down a list one by one, but now AI bots can make hundreds of calls simultaneously. While many small banks have robust, AI-powered security defenses that can detect suspicious activity, a flood of questionable transactions could make it difficult for a bank with limited staff to review those transactions or contact customers. And many of those customers may still be on the line with a person they believe is from the bank.
Some banks told Rivner that criminals apparently used AI to customize scams to a particular bank. For example, one bank official told him that customers were told they needed to provide sensitive information to help the bank transition them to the bank’s new website. That bank was indeed going through a website change.
“You’ve always had a trade-off between scale and quality,” says Rivner. “For the first time, (criminals) can do it at scale and with very high quality.”
[Read: Best Checking Accounts.]
Community Banks Have Advantages and Vulnerabilities in Fight Against Fraud
Anchin says he’s not familiar with the scam surge Rivner saw, but he says it wouldn’t surprise him. He says scam attacks on bank customers tend to come in waves.
“I think that institutions of all sizes are experiencing just a massive increase of fraud and scams across the board, so it’s very much an industry problem,” says Anchin. “Certainly community banks have been hit by these frauds and scams just the same way that the large banks have.”
There are some indications that smaller banks may be seeing a greater uptick in scams than their larger peers or online-only competitors.
More than 70% of credit unions and regional and community banks reported an increase in fraud in 2025, according to the Alloy State of Fraud Report, which surveyed institutions of all sizes. That’s a higher percentage than was reported by both big banks and fintechs. It’s also a jump from what smaller institutions reported the previous year, when 52% said they saw fraud attempts increase.
“Community banks, fortunately, have been preparing for this for quite some time,” says Anchin. “This is something that they’ve been looking at and developing strategies for, so I think they’re all very well-equipped to handle these surges.”
[Read: Best CD Rates.]
Long known for the relationships they build with customers, community banks now face a fraud landscape where that characteristic could either work for them or against them.
In addition to using sophisticated AI tools to safeguard customers’ accounts, smaller banks can launch awareness campaigns that big banks can’t really replicate, Anchin says.
“Community banks have a lot of different opportunities to have these conversations with customers vs. a larger institution that may have many more passive customers that they never have an opportunity to touch,” he says.
However, that trusting relationship might also pose potential vulnerabilities. Although a recent U.S. News survey found that more than three in four Americans are confident in their ability to detect scams, a phone call from the number of your local bank may not raise the red flags that a boilerplate text message from a national bank might.
Anchin says his best advice for consumers of any size bank is to be proactive in confirming that communication is actually from that institution.
“If you receive a request from your bank, call the bank and verify that it’s truly from them,” Anchin says. “Always know the phone number of your bank and always take the time to make that call.”
More from U.S. News
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2026 Banking Predictions: What to Expect with Rates, Scams and More
With AI’s Help, Fraudsters Are Targeting Smaller Banks originally appeared on usnews.com
