AI is reducing the cost of impersonation and persuasion, allowing small criminal operations to conduct more fraud without adding human workers. Chainalysis found average on-chain revenue of $3.2 million for scam operations with observed links to AI vendors, compared with $719,000 for operations without those links, although the data does not prove that AI caused the difference. As automated conversations become cheaper, defenses may need to focus more on stopping payments and recovering funds than on wasting scammers' time.