Scams and fraud in the crypto sphere amounted to an estimated $17 billion in 2025, according to data from Chainalysis.

The crypto analysis firm found that scam operations are being increasingly industrialised, driven by AI adaptions and cyber-crime-as-a-service offerings.

These innovations drove impersonation scams with a 1400% year-on-year growth, with AI scams increasing profitability 4.5 times over traditional methods.

High-yield investment programmes and pig butchering continue to dominate crypto fraud categories, but scams are converging due to AI advancements, Chainanalysis found, making traditional scam categories less distinct.

Impersonation scams are leveraging public trust in government institutions as well as big names in crypto.

A phishing scam targeting millions of Americans using a road toll collection system leveraged trust in a digital government system and was enacted by a Chinese-speaking cyber group called Dracula using phishing-as-a-service tools.

In the private sector, victims were defrauded of about £16 million through by a scammer impersonating Coinbase customer service representatives.

Chainanlaysis found that impersonation scams are increasingly moving to target the DeFi ecosystem, while other scams tended to rely on targeting centralised exchanges.

All the while AI continues to enhance the effectiveness of scams overall. Scams with links to AI tools and AI vendors tend to scale more quickly and be more severe, with higher payoffs, than those without visible links to AI.

While AI-linked scams amass 4.5 times the revenue of non-AI scams, the technology also improves the efficiency of the scams, with a higher daily revenue and an increased transaction value.

The research also revealed the increasing industrialisation of crypto scam operations, with a growing number of services culminating in a business model of specialised actors.

Chainanalysis discovered developer groups supplying phishing software, data brokers listing potential victims, tools offered to scale spam messages, specialists in dealing with stolen money, and even recruitment groups seeking skilled cyber-criminals.

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“This modular, service-based approach is a force multiplier and allows even technically unsophisticated criminals to execute sophisticated phishing campaigns, substantially lowering the barrier to entry for cryptocurrency fraud,” the Chainanalysis team said.

Many of these operations perform within the realm of social media, selling user profile accounts and access to perform scams at scale.

These tools and platforms are incredibly effective – scams employing these kits are 688 times more effective in terms of money, and four times more effective in terms of average transaction size compared to traditional scams.

The growing industrialisation of crypto scams will need an equally sophisticated and orchestrated approach to bring them down, Chainanalysis said. This will require a mix of real-time fraud detection systems and victim support, as well as cross-border coordination and international support for building technical assistance