It’s getting increasingly harder for the average person to avoid online scams. New technologies, including those powered by artificial intelligence, are helping cybercriminals boost both the sophistication and quantity of their scams.

And more people are losing more money to them. According to the Federal Trade Commission, American consumers lost a reported $12.5 billion to fraud last year, with much of that fraud starting online, marking a 25% increase from 2023. 

And experts say scammers aren’t showing any signs of letting up this year.

«At the highest level, 2025 is shaping up to be the year of the scam,» said Steve Grobman, executive vice president and chief technology officer for McAfee, noting that Americans now face a daily onslaught of scams by email, text, social media and other online sources.

McAfee, long known for its consumer security software, on Wednesday announced a new version of its AI-powered Scam Detector, which is designed to identify scams, then flag them for the users to see and provide advice about what to do.

The company first launched Scam Detector in January as an add-on service to its regular security software. The updated version launched Wednesday includes new, more powerful features and will be included at no extra charge in McAfee’s core plans.

Grobman said the idea is to combine the power of AI tools with the unique and constantly updating threat intelligence being collected and analyzed by McAfee’s security software to identify and stop scams before they can do any damage.

When it comes to messages, emails and videos, the features all work a little differently.

Text messages are automatically scanned as they arrive, while users must manually check messages that come through encrypted apps like iMessage, WhatsApp and Signal by either copying their text or uploading a screenshot into McAfee’s app. 

In the cases of those mobile messages, as well as emails, the AI will flag anything potentially scammy. It’s been trained to not just recognize links to scam websites, Grobman says, but also themes frequently used in scams like offers of deals too good to be true, or threats of fines or jail time if a recipient doesn’t act right away.

But where the AI powers really come into play is in the new version of McAfee’s Deepfake Detector. The original version launched last summer, but it was part of a separate paid service that was only available for Lenovo’s Copilot-Plus PCs, which included the hardware needed to do the AI processing on the device.

The new deepfake detection features, like McAfee’s other new scam-detection technologies, won’t cost extra. And while computers with neural processing units designed for AI operations will get better performance, Grobman says devices with less powerful central processing units also will now be able to use the features

The detector works on sites like YouTube, as well as social media platforms like X, TikTok and Instagram. It’s designed to alert consumers to deepfakes as they appear, but it doesn’t pass judgment on them. It will tell the user why it thinks the video is a deepfake and pinpoint the specific parts of the video that triggered its alerts. 

Videos aren’t flagged as disinformation or scams, though Grobman says the company’s researchers are hoping to eventually work McAfee’s scam detection capabilities into its Deepfake Detector.

The Scam Detector features work on both Apple and Android mobile devices, while the email scanning features are compatible with Gmail, Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo. Deepfake Detector is currently only available for Windows and Android, but McAFee hopes to add additional platforms soon.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections puzzle is all over the map. There’s a movie category, which you might spot right away. But there’s also a silent-letter grouping that could trip you up. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group, to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Move or flow.

Green group hint: Think Athens.

Blue group hint: Lights, camera, animals!

Purple group hint: Letters you don’t pronounce.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Absorb using capillary action.

Green group: Greek prefixes.

Blue group: Titular talking animals of film.

Purple group: Starting with silent letters.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is absorb using capillary action. The four answers are draw, pull, suck and wick.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is Greek prefixes. The four answers are hyper, kilo, meta and neo.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is titular talking animals of film. The four answers are Babe, Bolt, Dumbo and Ted.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is starting with silent letters. The four answers are gnome, knee, mnemonic and psyche.

Toughest Connections puzzles

We’ve made a note of some of the toughest Connections puzzles so far. Maybe they’ll help you see patterns in future puzzles.

#5: Included «things you can set,» such as mood, record, table and volleyball.

#4: Included «one in a dozen,» such as egg, juror, month and rose.

#3: Included «streets on screen,» such as Elm, Fear, Jump and Sesame.

#2: Included «power ___» such as nap, plant, Ranger and trip.

#1: Included «things that can run,» such as candidate, faucet, mascara and nose.

Google I/O runs over May 20 and 21 this year, with day 1 playing host to Google’s biggest keynote of 2025. We expect Big G to talk about its latest innovations across its ever-expanding portfolio of products and perhaps even show some sneak peeks at upcoming hardware. But only if we all collectively cross our fingers, promise to be good and eat all our vegetables.

Read more: Android 16: Everything Google Announced at the Android Show

The tech giant also hosted a totally separate event that focused solely on Android. The Android Show: I/O Edition saw Android 16 unveiled, with insights into the new Material 3 Expressive interface, updates to security and a focus on Gemini and how it’ll work on a variety of other devices. 

By breaking out Android news into its own virtual event, Google frees itself to spend more time during the I/O keynote to talk about Gemini, Deep Mind, Android XR and Project Astra. It’s going to be a jam-packed event, so here’s how you can watch I/O 2025 as it happens and what you can look forward to.

Google I/O: Where to watch

Google I/O proper kicks off with a keynote taking place on May 20, 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT, 6 p.m. BST). It’ll almost certainly be available to stream online on Google’s own YouTube channel, although a holding video is yet to be available. There’s no live link on the I/O website yet, either, though you can use the handy links to add the event to your calendar of choice. Expect links to a livestream to be available closer to the day.

What to expect from Google I/O 2025

Little chat about Android 16: As Google gave Android 16 its own outing already, it’s likely that it won’t be mentioned all that much during I/O. In fact at last year’s event, Android was barely mentioned, while uses of the term «AI» went well over a hundred. 

Android XR: Google didn’t talk much about Android XR during the Android show, focusing instead on the purely phone-based updates to the platform. We expected to hear more about the company’s latest foray into mixed-reality headsets in partnership with Samsung and its Project Moohan headset, so it’s possible that this is being saved for I/O proper. 

Gemini: With Android being spun out into its own separate event, Google is evidently clearing the way for I/O to focus on everything else the company does. AI will continue to dominate the conversation at I/O, just as it did last year (though hopefully Google can make it more understandable) with updates to many of its AI platforms expected to be announced. 

Gemini is expected to receive a variety of update announcements, including more information on its latest 2.5 Pro update which boasts various improvements to its reasoning abilities, and in particular to its helpfulness for coding applications. Expect lots of mentions of Google’s other AI-based products, too, including DeepMind, LearnLM and Project Astra. Let’s just hope Google has figured out how to make this information make any kind of sense.

Beyond AI, Google may talk about updates to its other products including GMail, Chrome and the Play Store, although whether these updates are big enough to be discussed during the keynote rather than as part of the developer-focused sessions following I/O’s opening remains to be seen.