AI adoption across crypto crime climbed 40% in the past year, TRM Labs said in a new index that scores criminal use at 54 out of 100.
Key Points:
- TRM Labs put AI use across crypto crime at 54 out of 100, up from roughly 28 two years ago.
- Scams rank as the most mature category, while hacking and ransomware sit one tier below.
- Reported deepfake scam losses this year have already passed the full 2025 total by 263%.
TRM Labs Index Rates AI Use Across Crypto Crime
The blockchain intelligence firm rates AI use across four categories of illicit activity, and the composite reading has roughly doubled since 2024, when the same measure sat near 28. Scammers drove most of the latest increase.
Scams now occupy what the firm calls a mature stage of adoption, meaning the tools are now embedded in routine operations rather than tested at the margins of a scheme. Hacking and ransomware sit one tier lower, in an emerging phase where human operators still direct the software by hand. Narcotics trafficking and darknet markets remain at the earliest stage, with use confined largely to marketing.
Crypto scam reports involving deepfakes or AI chatbots have risen as much as thirteenfold since 2022, and reported deepfake losses this year have already passed the full 2025 total by 263%.
Also Read: Binance Hands 300M Users A New Way To Let AI Agents Trade For Them
Ari Redbord Warns On Agentic Ransomware Threat
Ari Redbord, global head of policy and government affairs at the firm, said AI has not invented new crimes but stripped away the constraints on old ones. Work that once required a team of operators, he said, now takes one person with a subscription.
Most ransomware crews already apply AI at the phishing and initial access stages, the report found, and no-code kits that require no programming skill sell for $400 to $1,200. Cloud security researchers documented the first fully agentic ransomware operation on Jul. 1, an attack on an exposed database server that the researchers track as JadePuffer. A language model ran reconnaissance, stole credentials, moved laterally and encrypted the target without a human in the loop.
Executives at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium in Jackson Hole warned this week that autonomous agents could let attackers chase small wallets at a scale no human crew could match. Global Settlement Network Chief Executive Ryan Kirkley said a single agent can now go after everyone at once.
North Korea Hacks Frame The Record Six Months
The index lands after a bruising stretch for the wider crypto security industry. TRM counted 207 hacks in the first half of 2026, the highest six-month tally in its records, though losses fell to about $972 million from $2.3 billion in the same period a year earlier. North Korea-linked actors took roughly $643 million of that sum, and almost all of that came from two exploits in April at the decentralized finance platforms Drift and KelpDAO.
Read Next: MANTRA Falls 10% Following Attack Attempt That Freezes Deposits And Withdrawals
