A swarm of bots armed with your credit card information sounds like a glaring-red signal to cancel the card. But a swarm of bots with your credit card information—and permission to buy those jeans you’ve been eyeing? Doesn’t sound so bad.
Yet “shopping” with tools like OpenAI or Perplexity could wreak havoc on companies that already struggle to distinguish between so-called good and bad bots, warns Experian in its 2026 Future of Fraud Forecast, published today. The No. 1 threat to companies, according to the forecast, is “machine-to-machine mayhem” in which cybercriminals blend good bots doing your shopping with bad bots tasked with fraud.
“It’s not enough anymore to say that it’s a bot, so we need to stop this traffic,” said Kathleen Peters, chief innovation officer for fraud and identity at Experian North America. “Now, we need to say, ‘Is it a good bot or is it a malicious bot?’”
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission last year found that consumers lost more than $12.5 billion to fraud, while nearly 60% of companies reported an increase in losses from 2024 to 2025. Strikingly, financial losses ballooned by 25% even as the number of fraud reports held steady at 2.3 million a year, showing that schemes are getting more effective at cheating consumers and companies out of their money.
