AI Clones and Wallet Drainers: The Scam Evolution You Didn’t See Coming
By Dr. Pooyan Ghamari, Swiss Economist and Visionary
The most profitable criminal innovation of 2025 did not come from a new zero-day exploit or a bridge hack. It came from combining three technologies that are already in every teenager’s laptop: real-time voice cloning, live video avatars, and large language models with perfect memory.
The result is a new class of attack that bypasses every technical defense and goes straight for the only remaining weak point: human trust.
The Anatomy of a 2025 Deepfake Drain
- Target selection Publicly available video and audio longer than 30 seconds is enough. Influencers, Discord moderators, group-chat regulars, family members on TikTok: all are viable source material.
- Clone construction A 2025 open-source tools can produce a photorealistic, low-latency avatar and voice clone in under twenty minutes on consumer hardware. The model is then fine-tuned on the target’s entire public and leaked private message history.
- Relationship activation The clone initiates contact through the victim’s preferred channel (Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, even Signal, using a burner device or spoofed number. The conversation feels completely normal because the model has read years of prior chats.
- Urgency injection A plausible emergency or opportunity is introduced: a limited mint, an exchange withdrawal freeze, a wallet migration, a family medical crisis. The story is tailored to the victim’s known interests and risk tolerance.
- Guided extraction The victim is walked through a sequence of on-chain approvals that appear harmless or even beneficial. Most attacks rely on unlimited ERC-20/NFT approvals or signer impersonation via EIP-712 blind signing. The victim confirms every transaction personally on his own hardware wallet.
Average loss per incident in monitored cases during the second half of 2025: $340 000. Detection rate by traditional fraud teams: <4 %. Recovery rate: effectively zero.
Scale and Industrialization
Specialized teams in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe already operate farms of 50–200 parallel clones. Each operator oversees dozens of concurrent “relationships” using automated scheduling and LLM-driven dialogue management. Reported monthly revenue for the largest groups now exceeds traditional ransomware organizations.
The marginal cost of adding one more victim is close to zero. The only bottleneck is fresh source audio/video and new wallet addresses to drain.
Why Current Countermeasures Fail
- Hardware wallets protect against remote key extraction, not against the legitimate owner voluntarily signing malicious transactions.
- 2FA and SMS verification are irrelevant when the victim is actively cooperating.
- On-chain monitoring flags anomalous transfers, but the transfers initiated by the victim himself are treated as legitimate.
- Social-recovery mechanisms are compromised when the clone simultaneously impersonates multiple guardians.
Realistic Defense Layers for 2026 and Beyond
- Mandatory delay-and-review for high-value approvals (e.g., 24-hour cooling period above $10 000).
- Wallet firmware that blocks unlimited SetApprovalForAll and unlimited spender allowances by default.
- Pre-agreed duress codes or lifeline phrases that must be spoken in any unsolicited financial discussion.
- Private, offline ceremony for adding new approved contracts or spenders, similar to current multisig setup processes.
- Enterprise-grade monitoring of public audio/video for unauthorized cloning attempts (already offered by several reputation-management firms).
Outlook
Absent rapid protocol and wallet-level changes, annual losses from AI-clone drainage are projected to reach tens of billions of dollars by 2027. The attack surface is effectively unlimited: every person who has ever spoken on camera or recorded a voice note is a potential clone source.
This is no longer a theoretical threat. It is the dominant retail crypto theft vector of late 2025 and will remain so until the industry stops relying on human judgment as the final authorization layer.
Dr. Pooyan Ghamari Swiss Economist and Visionary