Artificial intelligence is making cryptocurrency scams cheaper to operate and easier to scale, with AI-enabled fraud increasingly helping criminals generate significantly higher revenues.
According to Chainalysis, impersonation fraud increased by more than 1,400% in 2025, while at least $14 billion flowed into cryptocurrency scams during the year. The figure could eventually exceed $17 billion as additional illicit wallets are identified.
The average crypto scam payment also increased substantially, rising from $782 in 2024 to $2,764 in 2025.
AI-Powered Scams Are More Profitable
Chainalysis found that scam operations with identifiable on-chain links to AI tool providers collected an average of $3.2 million per operation, compared with approximately $719,000 for operations without such links.
AI-linked scam operations also recorded an average of 35.1 transfers per day, compared with 3.89 transfers for other operations.
This represents roughly nine times higher transaction activity and 4.5 times higher revenue for scams linked to AI tools.
TRM Labs separately reported an approximately 500% increase in AI-enabled scam activity over the past year. According to the company, generative AI is allowing criminals to automate phishing, impersonation, synthetic identities and other fraud-related activities that previously required larger teams.
Deepfakes Target Crypto KYC Systems
Artificial intelligence is also creating new challenges for cryptocurrency platforms’ identity verification systems.
Research cited by identity-security companies suggests that an AI-generated identity capable of challenging Know Your Customer (KYC) systems can cost less than $20 and take approximately 30 minutes to create.
Injection attacks can further enable criminals to feed synthetic video directly into verification systems instead of using a physical camera.
One 2026 benchmark found that these injection attacks defeated basic single-layer liveness checks 58% of the time.
Binance Research reported that cryptocurrency accounts for 88% of detected deepfake fraud cases globally. It also estimated that around 80% of attacks targeting Binance involve some form of KYC fraud.
AI Is Also Being Used to Fight Crypto Fraud
Cryptocurrency companies and law enforcement agencies are increasingly using artificial intelligence and other technologies to counter these threats.
Binance said AI has delivered up to a 100-fold improvement in operational efficiency for KYC processing, while its facial-attack and liveness-detection systems continue to be retrained.
Asset recovery and enforcement efforts have also expanded. Binance Research reported that Tether had frozen more than $4.4 billion in assets by April 2026, while the T3 Financial Crime Unit had frozen more than $300 million during its first year.
International law enforcement agencies have also taken action against crypto-related criminal networks.
INTERPOL’s Operation First Light 2026 resulted in 5,811 arrests across 97 countries and territories and the interception of approximately $293 million in illicit assets.
Meanwhile, Europol’s Operation Endgame disrupted 326 servers and 142 domains, recovered 27 million stolen credentials and restricted more than €41 million in criminal crypto assets.
The growing use of AI has not necessarily created entirely new types of cryptocurrency scams. Instead, it has significantly reduced the cost and time required for criminals to create convincing identities, communicate with victims and operate fraudulent schemes at a much larger scale.
