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The crypto scam market is now worth at least $14 billion a year, according to Chainalysis, up from $13 billion. The crypto tracing company said it’s likely to rise to $17 billion, as it continues to identify illicit funds from 2025 in the early months of this year.

One reason for the jump is AI, which criminals can use to do things like generate fake identities and deepfakes for their fraudulent personas. In its analysis, Chainalysis found scams carried out by groups that purchased AI tools on average scored $3.2 million from victims per swindle, compared to $719,000 for those not using AI. That’s 4.5 times more revenue per scam.

That scammers are making such vast sums is no surprise. Over the last year, the feds have filed to seize billions that were stolen via so-called “pig butchering” schemes, where victims are tricked into believing they’re part of a lucrative crypto investment platform before scammers make off with all their money. What’s apparent from those cases is that pig butcherers are prevalent across all kinds of social sites, from LinkedIn to Instagram, where they lure targets into fake investment vehicles.

Across 2025, Forbes reported on pig butchering scams on dating apps like Hinge, Tinder and eHarmony, as well as on major apps like TikTok, WhatsApp, Facebook and X, netting the crooks hundreds of millions of dollars. In a recently unsealed case in San Diego, the FBI investigated the case of a woman who’d met a man who called himself Jack Zhang on eHarmony. She was convinced by Zhang to invest over $730,000 in a fake trading platform, which she saw grow to over $1 million. But when she tried to withdraw her money, she couldn’t and was asked to pay a fee of $128,000, at which point she realized she’d been scammed.........

© Forbes