Voipy · Blog · Pricing
Research · · 9 min read

The 91 patterns: what Q1 2026 phone scams actually look like

Voipy Shield runs a 91-pattern reference library — a curated catalog of every distinct phone-scam pattern we've encountered, advisory we've cross-referenced, and family-of-attacks we screen for in production. We grow it from FTC, FBI/IC3, FCC, HHS-OIG, BBB, SEC, and AARP advisories plus our own field telemetry.

This post is a field report on what Q1 2026 phone scams look like as of April 25, 2026. If you run an eldercare facility, a family caregiver shop, a financial-services compliance team, or a phone product that handles senior callers — this is the working list.

The big shift: AI is in the workflow now, not just the marketing

Every quarter from 2022 through 2024 we'd add 1-2 patterns and the bulk of the catalog stayed stable: IRS-arrest-warrant, Social Security suspension, Microsoft tech support, fake Medicare cards, Nigerian-prince-shaped wire-transfer asks. Static enough that you could train a senior on it once and they'd recognize most variants.

That isn't true anymore. Q4 2024 through Q1 2026 added the following AI-tooled patterns to the library:

The unifying pattern: AI dropped the cost of personalization to near-zero, so the attacker can now run a credible specific attack against your specific family member, your specific bank, your specific employer. The 2010-2020 scam was spray-and-pray. The 2026 scam is bespoke.

The new categories from FTC/FBI 2024-2025 advisories

We added seven patterns in late 2024 / early 2025 that had no obvious precedent in the 2020 catalog:

The unchanged classics still hit hardest

Despite the new patterns, the 2026 dollar-loss leaderboard is still dominated by patterns that haven't structurally changed in a decade:

If the senior in your life only knows one thing, it should be this: no real government agency, no real utility, no real bank ever asks for payment in gift cards, wire transfer, cryptocurrency, or remote-desktop access. None. Ever. That single rule covers most of the dollar volume.

Spanish-speaking targets get specifically scammed

About 35% of our Spanish-language pattern entries are direct ports of English-language scams (IRS, SSA, Medicare). The remaining 65% target Spanish-speakers specifically: fake immigration-attorney "your case is in danger", fake remittance-service "we lost your transfer", fake LATAM consulate. We screen them all in Spanish — every refuse pattern in the library has both English and Spanish openings.

If the senior caller you're protecting prefers Spanish, the protection has to be Spanish-native. A US-tuned model that hands off to "press 2 for Spanish" is half-effective.

What defends

Three layers, ordered by effectiveness:

  1. A trusted-caller list. Family registers their primary callers. Those numbers skip the screening unless the call pattern is anomalous (3 AM, unusual length, voice-authenticity mismatch). Cuts false-positives to near-zero.
  2. A library-driven screening layer. Voipy Shield runs every inbound caller's first 10 seconds against the 91-pattern library. Pattern matches with high confidence go to a soft-block-with-staff-review path (not auto-disconnect — never auto-disconnect, that's how you block real grandsons).
  3. A weekly digest to the family. Plaintext email listing what was blocked, categorized. Turns the product from "I forget I have it" to "I can show my sister what this saved us from this week".

If you run a senior-living facility, family caregiver service, or a financial-services compliance team and want this layer on your line: start a 14-day Shield trial. We don't charge until day 15. The full 91-pattern library is included on every plan.

What's next in the library

We expect to add ~15 patterns in 2026 H2 based on what's emerging in advisories already:

If your team tracks any of these and wants to compare notes — reach out. We share the full library catalog with eldercare advocates and consumer-protection nonprofits at no cost.

— Anton

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