AI-Enabled Scams Are Closing In On Crypto Hacks As A Security Threat

Impersonation and AI-driven scams are emerging as one of crypto's biggest security threats, according to Chainalysis data, which puts on-chain inflows to crypto scams at a minimum of $14 billion in 2025. Not all of that is AI. Rime Salmi, founder and CEO of Fractl, told us in an interview, "There are a lot of people who are posing as investors and they're absolutely not. They're looking for investments or grifting actually." Salmi said the technology itself blurs the line: "AI is a big buzzword, but we don't know where the human fits in that anymore. Are we okay with one person company or are we still funding solid big teams?"

The Economics of AI-Enabled Fraud

Salmi said AI has stopped being a separate category at all: "It's part of everything. So it's not a thing on its own anymore." Chainalysis put scams with on-chain links to AI vendors at $3.2 million per operation on average, against $719,000 for scams without them, a correlation it does not present as cause. She said the one defense that still holds is data nobody can copy: "If a startup has solid proprietary data, that's something that would be very difficult to vibe code them out of because it would just take years to get really high quality in depth data."