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. Fraud has found an automation budget.

Scamming has always required a surprising amount of manual labor. Romance scams need someone to keep a conversation going for weeks, investment fraud needs someone to answer questions and maintain a believable identity, and impersonation scams need someone to keep the act together long enough to transfer money. AI can now do more of that work, meaning the same criminal operation can reach far more people without adding more humans.

That's what FATF president Giles Thomson meant when he 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. It's a grimly efficient version of the productivity boom every other industry has been promised.

The important change isn't that AI is about to make scammers unemployed. It's that every scam becomes cheaper to run. One person can maintain more fake identities, carry on more conversations, and attempt more fraud at the same time, which means criminals don't need a giant operation to create the appearance of one.

For an industry built around stealing other people's money, that's a fairly compelling productivity gain.

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 as much revenue per operation.

That doesn't mean buying an AI subscription automatically quadruples a criminal's income. Larger operations may simply be more likely to buy sophisticated tools, and Chainalysis can't see every use of AI through blockchain data.

What the numbers do show is why criminals have an incentive to automate.