How AI Is Supercharging The New Wave Of AI Scams
A recent survey finds 72% of respondents say AI is making scams more sophisticated.
By the time Daniel realized he'd been scammed, he'd already lost more than half a million dollars – and nearly everything else.
A 63-year-old deaf former competitive swimmer with a government job and a tidy nest egg, Daniel (a pseudonym) was just looking for a better return than his 401(k). What he found instead was a sophisticated AI-enabled scam that wiped out his savings, shattered his marriage and left him owing hundreds of thousands in back taxes and fees for lump-sum withdrawals from retirement accounts.
'I just knew I had been pig butchered,' Daniel wrote in an interview. 'The scam caused the loss of my marriage, my family, my share of assets and my ability to retire. The beautiful life I had, came to a sudden halt. Completely destroyed.'
Daniel's story isn't unique. It's becoming alarmingly common, according to Chris Groshong and Joseph Albiñana, co-founders of CoinStructive, a firm that helps victims of digital asset fraud. And the reason these scams are proliferating so quickly? AI.
'These scammers have leveled up,' Groshong said in an interview. 'They're using AI to create hyperrealistic personas. Video chats. Lip-synced conversations. It's not like five years ago when you could spot a fake. AI has erased that line."
He cited one client – an AI professional – who was tricked by a convincing video call with a scammer impersonating a well-known investor. 'He lost $1.3 million,' Groshong said. 'It was his entire nest egg. The scammers used AI against him, and he still can't believe he fell for it."
The Data Guardian Network is a novel project that's committed to AI privacy and security by building a community around ethical data use and gamification. Johanna Cabildo is CEO of DGN. She confirms that AI tools are making these attacks faster and cheaper to launch, exacerbating social engineering and enabling scammers to reach a wider audience that owns digital assets.
'AI is also fuelling automated threats like wallet-draining scripts that adapt to evade detection, smart contract exploits refined through reinforcement learning and airdrop scams that mimic legitimate distributions. One campaign used AI to scan Discord chats, identify users asking for help and reply with malicious links. It was posing as 'support staff' using human-like responses,' Cabildo wrote in a text response.
Daniel's experience followed a now-familiar pattern. A stranger messaged him on Facebook after a casual comment about golf. She claimed to be an investor and wholesaler of successful skin care products.
'I checked her online,' Daniel said. 'She had photos with dermatologists, images with boxes of her product, a Houston business address – everything seemed legit.'
She introduced him to a platform called PawnFi (later renamed Polarise), and even deposited $30,000 into his account to earn his trust. She sent photos, shared personal details and warned him to keep everything secret.
He began trading on PawnFi. Made small withdrawals. Saw big seven-figure returns. Then came the hook: he was told he'd exceeded the platform's profit threshold and had to pay a $250,000 tax bill from his own pocket to access his funds.
'That's when it clicked,' he said. 'It was too late.'
Groshong said that tax-payment ruse is a common pressure tactic: 'They let you withdraw small amounts to build trust. Then, when the amount gets big, they lock it down and demand more money." Adding insult to injury, scammers often refer their own victims to fake 'crypto recovery' services – just to squeeze out a few more dollars.
A recent survey on Statista found that 72% of respondents believe that AI is making scams more sophisticated. Albiñana confirms those findings. He says AI is accelerating the scale and precision of these scams.
'They're saturating people with outreach,' he explained. 'Texts, emails, popups, phone calls. All it takes is one weak moment. And now with AI, that 'pretty face' or 'video call' looks and sounds completely real."
Pig butchering schemes – long cons where scammers build trust over weeks or months – are the most common. But CoinStructive also sees imposter scams, fake firmware updates, romance cons and task scams where victims are 'hired' to perform meaningless digital tasks before being asked to front money for fees.
Even smart, cautious people fall for it.
'There is a poison for every single person,' Albiñana said. 'Crypto scams aren't about intelligence. They're about trust. And AI helps scammers mimic that trust better than ever."
Daniel said the hardest part now isn't the debt – it's the shame.
'I used to have good faith and trust in most people,' he wrote. 'It's no longer there. I hate to say it, but my naiveness got the best of me and ruined my life.'
For those just entering the digital asset space, Daniel had a simple warning: 'Don't place trust in anyone whether you know them or not. The criminals are very sharp and very good at what they do.'
Groshong and Albiñana shared five practical tips to help protect yourself:
Cabildo noted that it's not just about spotting AI fakes, it's about confirming verifiable trust especially when dealing with digital assets.
'For individuals, this means treating every direct message and 'urgent opportunity' as suspicious. Always check URLs for accuracy – this one is incredibly simple but a common mistake. Projects should implement multi-signature wallets, requiring multiple approvals for transactions and adopt AI threat tools that flag on-chain anomalies like sudden bot-driven token movements,' she concluded.
If you've been scammed or suspect a fraud, report it immediately to the FTC, IC3 and your local authorities. And if you need help navigating the murky waters of digital asset recovery, firms like CoinStructive are doing their part—though even they admit successful recoveries are rare.
'Out of hundreds of cases,' Groshong said, 'only two have ever gotten their money back. And one of them is still waiting."
For Daniel, the only thing left is to keep going and piece his life back together in the wake of the AI scam. Some concerned individuals helped him set up a fundraising page to keep hope alive. 'I'm living one day at a time,' he said. 'Very differently. Very cautiously.'
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