TRM Labs reports 224 victims drained of 274.6 ETH by fake AI bot tutorials on YouTube

A scam campaign disguised as AI-powered crypto trading tutorials drained 274.60 ETH, roughly $517,205, from 224 victims over a six-month stretch this year. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs published the findings on September 14, detailing one of the more creative social engineering attacks the industry has seen in recent memory. The twist: victims weren’t phished in the traditional sense. They deployed the malicious contracts themselves, following step-by-step video instructions from AI-generated YouTube presenters who looked and sounded like real people. How the scam worked Between February 12 and August 11, 2026, nine nearly identical YouTube tutorials appeared, each featuring an AI virtual host walking viewers through what was pitched as a fully autonomous crypto arbitrage bot. The tutorials claimed the bot was powered by Anthropic’s Claude AI, lending a veneer of legitimacy from a well-known AI brand. Viewers were told to deploy a smart contract on Ethereum and fund it with 1 to 2 ETH to get the bot running. The instructions walked them through connecting their wallets, deploying the contract, and hitting “Start” or “Withdraw” to activate the supposed arbitrage strategy. W...