A Queensland man enjoyed soaring profits from a crypto trading app. Then his money started disappearing

The administrative work required to run an effective investment scam has been drastically cut by using merging technology

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Within days of clicking on an online ad for a cryptocurrency trading app, a 29-year-old Queensland man watched his dashboard soar with profits.

Making investment gains was as simple as downloading the slick-looking app and browser extension linked to his crypto wallet. So he invested more.

Then the losses began. Unauthorised transfers started flowing from his crypto wallet and soon he had lost more than $166,000.

Frantic, he attempted to contact customer support, only to find the platform’s customer service team was a basic chatbot.

It was only then he realised he had fallen victim to an investment scam constructed by artificial intelligence.

Data from Scamwatch shows Australians have lost more than $45m to fraudulent investment schemes in 2026 so far, after over $160m in reported losses in 2025.

Experts say AI is significantly cutting the administrative work required to run an effective investment scam, replacing cold calls and isolated phishing emails with entire “scam ecosystems”.

Dr Marco Navone, an associate professor of finance at the University of Technology Sydney says traditional red flags no longer apply, meaning consumer can’t always recognise the “industrial-grade” deception.

“Criminal networks can now deploy hyper-realistic, localised media, fake news articles, synthetic reviews … at scale,” Navone says. “[Historically], your first suspicion came from a cheap webpage, or a company phone number that was a mobile number instead of a 1300.

“All these small inconsistencies are now gone … this is especially the case when scammers target vulnerable parts of the population.”

The Australian Federal Police say scammers can clone voices from a few seconds of audio, generate convincing deepfakes and send thousands of personalised messages based on a victim’s location and online history. AI-generated investment scams often offer access to a “financial adviser” with an Australian or English accent.

While the Australian Securities and Investments Commission deactivated nearly 12,000 scam websites in 2025, scammers frequently bypass removal using “cloaking” technology to serve scams to targeted users while showing harmless content to moderators.

Cybercrime groups now integrate AI into almost every operational phase, says Dr Andrew Childs, a criminology lecturer at Griffith University.

Source: Read the original article on www.theguardian.com