AI-powered scams are impacting the crypto industry, as many fraudsters are combining the pseudonymity of digital assets with the automation of AI to exploit users at scale.
Common AI-powered scams include deepfakes, phishing bots, fake trading platforms, voice cloning, and impersonation in chat applications.
As artificial intelligence (AI) tools become more accessible, ubiquitous, and advanced, their applications have exploded across industries — from finance and healthcare, to entertainment and education. But while much of the AI conversation centers around productivity and the future of manual work, a more concerning trend is emerging: cybercriminals are now using AI to supercharge increasingly convincing and scalable scams.
AI-powered scams are also impacting the cryptocurrency industry, as many fraudsters are combining the pseudonymity of digital assets with the automation of AI to exploit users at scale. Unfortunately, these scams are often harder to detect, faster to deploy, and disturbingly convincing.
Unlike traditional crypto scams — typically manual and repetitive — AI-powered scams harness the speed, scale, and sophistication of modern machine learning (ML) models. They are therefore more adaptive, harder to spot, and often convincingly human.
At the intersection of AI and crypto lies a perfect storm: crypto is decentralized, fast-moving, and not consistently regulated across jurisdictions. AI adds another layer of deception by creating fake identities, realistic conversations, and websites nearly indistinguishable from the real versions.
Scammers are increasingly turning to AI because it offers scalability, believability, and automation. A single attacker can now deploy thousands of phishing messages, fake support agents, or investment bots — all generated and managed by AI.
The chart below shows the share of the total scam ecosystem made up of known counterparties to AI software vendors. The volume share shows the proportion of total scam inflows to scams that have also sent value to AI software vendors on-chain (representing a likely purchase of AI tools). The deposits share shows that roughly 60% of all deposits into scam wallets on-chain go into scams that leverage AI. Both statistics have been steadily increasing since 2021, around when AI started to reach the mainstream, and show that this ecosystem is increasingly dominated by AI-powered scams.
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