Artificial intelligence is making cryptocurrency scams cheaper to operate and easier to scale, with impersonation fraud rising more than 1,400% in 2025.
Chainalysis estimates that at least $14 billion flowed into crypto scams during the year and projects the total could eventually exceed $17 billion as more illicit wallets are identified. The average scam payment also climbed from $782 in 2024 to $2,764 in 2025, while payments linked to impersonation scams increased sharply.
AI-Powered Scams Are More Profitable
Chainalysis found that scam operations with visible on-chain links to AI tool providers collected an average of $3.2 million each, compared with $719,000 for operations without those links.
AI-linked scams also averaged 35.1 transfers per day compared with 3.89, representing roughly nine times the transaction activity and 4.5 times the revenue.
TRM Labs separately reported an approximately 500% increase in AI-enabled scam activity over the past year. The company says generative AI is helping criminals automate phishing, impersonation, synthetic identities, and other parts of fraud operations that previously required larger teams.
Deepfakes Are Making KYC Easier to Beat
Identity verification has also become a major target.
Research cited by identity-security vendors indicates that an AI-generated identity capable of challenging KYC systems can cost under $20 and take around 30 minutes to prepare. Injection attacks can feed synthetic video directly into a verification system instead of presenting it through a physical camera.
One 2026 benchmark found that such injection attacks defeated basic single-layer liveness checks 58% of the time.
Binance Research says cryptocurrency represents 88% of detected deepfake fraud cases globally. It also says around 80% of attacks targeting Binance involve some form of KYC fraud.
Enforcement Is Scaling Too
Defensive systems are increasingly using AI as well. Binance says AI has delivered up to a 100-fold improvement in operational efficiency for KYC processing while its face-attack and liveness systems are continually retrained.
Money recovery and enforcement remain another layer of defense. Binance Research says Tether had frozen more than $4.4 billion in assets by April 2026, while the T3 Financial Crime Unit had frozen over $300 million during its first year.
INTERPOL’s Operation First Light 2026 resulted in 5,811 arrests across 97 countries and territories and intercepted $293 million in illicit assets.
Europol’s Operation Endgame also disrupted 326 servers and 142 domains, recovered 27 million stolen credentials, and restricted more than €41 million, or roughly $47 million, in criminal crypto assets.
The figures show that the underlying scams have not necessarily become new. What has changed is the cost and speed at which criminals can create convincing identities, communicate with victims, and operate at scale.
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