Anthropic · Financial Times · CryptoSlate
AI was supposed to take scammers’ jobs, but it gave them superpowers instead
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For anyone worried that AI would eliminate every profession except the one sending messages about your frozen crypto account, there's unwelcome news for that last bastion of human enterprise.
Key facts
- Chainalysis found average on-chain revenue of $3.2 million per scam operation with observed links to AI vendors, compared with $719,000 for operations without those links, or roughly 4.5 times
- Amnesty International's 2025 investigation into Cambodian scam compounds documented at least 53 sites and interviewed 58 survivors from eight nationalities
- 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
- According to Anthropic, the model assisted with parts of the technical work, analyzed information, and helped prepare extortion demands that sometimes exceeded $500,000
Summary
01 AI is helping scammers automate identities and conversations, allowing smaller teams to target far more people. 02 AI-linked scam operations averaged 4.5 times more on-chain revenue in Chainalysis data, showing the incentive to scale. 03 As automated persuasion gets cheaper, defenses may have to focus more on stopping the money than wasting scammers’ time. Scamming has always required a surprising amount of manual labor.