AI has given criminal networks the one thing they never had: unlimited scale. Now the question is whether defenders can match it.

On a factory floor in Amberg, Germany, an AI tells Siemens engineers that a machine is going to fail 12 to 36 hours before it does, on a line that ships a finished product every second with a defect rate of one in 100,000.

In March, Eli Lilly agreed to pay up to $2.75 billion for access to an agent that has already designed 28 drug candidates, nearly half of them in human trials. In April, a JAMA study of five academic medical centers found AI scribes handed doctors back 16 minutes of paperwork on every patient visit. Toyota gave the tools to its assembly line workers and saved 10,000 hours of labor a year.

However, criminals also look to AI to supercharge their operations. A single scammer now runs hundreds of conversations at once, in a dozen languages, around the clock. An agentic ransomware attack breaks in, spreads and locks up a company while its operators sleep. A sanctioned state manufactures a job applicant — complete with a face, a voice and a résumé — and places that phantom inside an American company.

The scale that once required a criminal organization now requires a subscription.

The TRM AI index, published in August, scores AI adoption across the major categories of crypto-enabled crime at 54 out of 100, up from 28 in 2024. That is a 40% jump in a single year and likely just the beginning.

Deepfakes At Industrial Scale

Two weeks ago, police in Northern Ireland reported a single victim who lost £250,000 after watching an AI-generated video of a celebrity endorsing an investment. Months of WhatsApp messages followed, then a small test deposit that appeared to grow, then remote access to the victim’s computer, then a loan to invest more.

In February, Hong Kong police kicked in the doors of two units in a Kowloon Bay industrial building and arrested 31 people, among them a Hong Kong Premier League footballer. The crew used AI-generated faces and deepfake video calls to pose as wealthy young women on dating apps, then steered their marks into cryptocurrency platforms promising 50% returns in six months. Police traced more than HK$34 million in losses.

In 2024, an employee at the engineering firm Arup joined a video conference in which the chief financial officer and every colleague on the screen was a deepfake, and wired $25.6 million before anyone picked up a phone to check.

Scams are the one category of crime where the index finds AI use fully mature. Reports of scams........

© Forbes