Author: Evan Mercer

The Economics of AI-Enabled Fraud

Fraud has always demanded surprising amounts of manual labor. Romance scams require weeks of sustained conversation, investment fraud needs operators to answer questions and maintain believable identities, and impersonation scams demand performers who can keep an act together long enough to extract money. Artificial intelligence is now automating significant portions of that work, allowing the same criminal operation to reach exponentially more victims without adding human operators.

This shift caught the attention of the Financial Action Task Force. President Giles Thomson told the Financial Times this month that AI could let “one or two people in a basement with a very big server” do work that once required a much larger scam operation. The observation captures a grimly efficient version of the productivity boom promised across legitimate industries.

The critical change is not that AI will make scammers unemployed. Rather, every scam becomes cheaper to run. A single operator can maintain more fake identities, sustain more simultaneous conversations, and attempt more fraud attempts concurrently, creating the appearance of a large organization without the overhead. For an enterprise built on stealing money, that represents a compelling productivity gain.

Data Reveals Scale of AI-Adoption Among Criminal Groups

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis found that scam operations with observed links to AI vendors generated average on-chain revenue of $3.2 million per operation, compared with $719,000 for operations without those links—roughly 4.5 times as much revenue per operation. The data does not prove that buying an AI subscription automatically quadruples criminal income; larger operations may simply be more likely to purchase sophisticated tools, and Chainalysis cannot observe every AI use case through blockchain data alone. However, the figures illustrate why criminals have a powerful incentive to automate.

Traditional confidence fraud is labor-intensive because someone must maintain the illusion. A fake investment adviser needs to answer questions, a romance scammer must remember previous conversations, and an impersonator must sound enough like a colleague or executive to avoid suspicion. AI makes that sustained attention cheap. Criminals do not need software to feel empathy—only software that can imitate empathy well enough to keep a target engaged.

This capability allows one operator to manage more conversations, in more languages, for longer periods, while generating convincing documents, images, voices, and identities. The expensive part of the scam—maintaining the human performance—can increasingly be rented from a model.

Losses Mount as FBI and Anthropic Document Real-World Impact

The financial toll is already substantial. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center report recorded 22,364 complaints containing AI-related information and approximately $893.3 million in adjusted losses. Those cases span fake romantic identities, business impersonation, and other frauds built on convincing victims they are dealing with a real person.

An even more direct example emerged from Anthropic’s August 2025 misuse report. The company documented an actor using Claude Code in an extortion campaign targeting at least 17 organizations. According to Anthropic, the model assisted with technical work, analyzed information, and helped prepare extortion demands that sometimes exceeded $500,000. The company subsequently banned the accounts and shared information with authorities. The significance lies not in the specific model or victim count, but in the demonstration that work previously requiring different people with different skills can now be coordinated by one operator with software assisting across multiple operational phases.

Victims do not see the smaller organization behind the curtain. They encounter a convincing email, a believable identity, a professional-looking service, or a person who appears to know exactly what they are discussing. AI lets a tiny operation present the surface area of a much larger one.

Why Crypto Remains a Prime Target for Automated Fraud

For cryptocurrency, this dynamic is particularly effective because the distance between persuasion and payment is exceptionally short. A scammer can spend days or weeks building trust, but once the victim agrees, moving crypto can take seconds. Making the first part cheaper means criminals can push far more people toward the second.

The Scam Factories Aren’t Disappearing

There is a tempting narrative that AI will take scammers’ jobs, but the reality inside actual scam compounds complicates that picture. Many workers in these operations are not willing participants.

Amnesty International’s 2025 investigation into Cambodian scam compounds documented at least 53 sites and interviewed 58 survivors from eight nationalities, finding evidence of trafficking, forced labor, confinement, and violence. Those operations have not been replaced by two people and a server. FinCEN’s September analysis of Southeast Asian scam centers describes large transnational criminal organizations operating alongside AI-enabled services and other specialized criminal infrastructure.

The two models coexist because automation does not necessarily shrink an industry—sometimes it simply increases how much the same workforce can produce. A scam operation that automates part of every conversation faces two choices: attempt the same amount of fraud with fewer people, or keep the people and dramatically increase the number of targets. For victims, neither outcome is comforting.

This is why the idea that AI will put scammers out of work misses the more important economic change. The relevant unit is not how many people the criminal enterprise employs, but how cheaply it can attempt another fraud. If the cost of producing a convincing fake identity falls, more fake identities become economical. If one person can supervise dozens of conversations instead of five, the number of people a gang can approach expands accordingly. The internet already made distribution almost free; AI is now reducing the cost of persuasion.

When Bots Start Talking to Bots

The defense industry has responded with automation of its own. Telecom provider O2 created Daisy, an AI grandmother designed to keep phone scammers talking for as long as possible. In the company’s account, Daisy answered scammers more than 1,000 times and spent hundreds of hours in conversation, with some calls lasting around 40 minutes. The concept works by attacking a resource that used to be scarce: the scammer’s time.

But that defense weakens when the scammer’s side of the conversation is also automated. If one bot spends 40 minutes discussing a fictional bank problem with another bot pretending to be someone’s grandmother, neither criminal nor victim has lost 40 minutes of human life. Two organizations can congratulate themselves on engagement metrics while the electricity meter does most of the work.

That absurd endpoint reveals where the defensive problem is moving. Wasting scammers’ time helps when human attention is expensive. As AI makes that attention cheaper, defenses must move closer to the point where criminals still need something real: an account capable of receiving money, an exchange or payment service that lets them move proceeds, a mule network or bank to process transfers, and victims to authorize those transfers. Those choke points are harder to automate away.

Interpol’s 2026 global fraud assessment describes more than 1,500 transnational fraud cases involving $1.1 billion in reported losses and highlights international efforts to stop payments after fraud has been detected. CryptoSlate has previously covered how AI is increasing the scale of crypto scams. The next stage concerns what happens when convincing fraud becomes abundant.

Familiar voices can no longer carry as much trust when voices can be generated for fractions of a cent. Video calls become weaker evidence when faces can be synthesized. A long, thoughtful conversation means less when maintaining it costs almost nothing. That leaves ordinary people doing more verification while criminals do less manual work. The great promise of automation was that software would take tedious tasks away from humans. Fraud has found a particularly irritating implementation: the machine handles the impersonation, while the person receiving the message must investigate whether anybody involved is real. AI may eventually reduce the number of humans required to run a scam. Unfortunately, it also makes running another scam much cheaper.