Somewhere right now, a scam operation is running a sharper go-to-market motion than most fintechs. It has specialist teams, a software supplier with tiered pricing, a customer support channel and a constant stream of fresh marketing copy. It measures what converts, and kills what doesn’t.
This is what fraud looks like in 2026. Chainalysis estimates US$17 billion was stolen through crypto scams and fraud in 2025, and describes the operations behind it as “industrialised”. For a fintech, the most useful way to think about scammers is as a competitor: well funded, fast moving, and selling a counterfeit version of your product to your customers.
They’re organised like a scale-up
Modern scam networks split the work into specialist teams, the same way a growing company does. Chainalysis breaks down one phishing operation, known as Lighthouse, into five groups. Each one directly maps onto a function inside your own business.
The tooling is sold like software. Phishing kits we have profiled ourselves are available for under $500 USD, with pricing tiers for full development, proxy setup, and updates and support. Lighthouse itself took more than 7,000 payments over three years. Sellers even run customer service for their scammer clients through Telegram channels.
The result is a low barrier to entry. Someone with no technical skill can buy a ready made clone of your login page, a list of targets and a messaging tool, and launch a campaign within a day.
Their funnel runs through your brand
Lay a scam campaign next to your own customer journey and the stages line up almost exactly.
Every stage borrows something you built: your name, your logo, your app design, even the tone of your support team. In effect, your brand is their landing page.
Their unit economics are hard to beat
Your customer acquisition cost includes years of brand building. Theirs rounds to zero, because they spend yours. Every dollar you invest in awareness also lifts the conversion rate of the people impersonating you.
Automation and AI then multiply the return. According to Chainalysis:
- Scams linked to AI vendors extract an average of $3.2 Million USD per operation, 4.5 times the $719,000 USD taken by scams without those links.
- AI-linked scams process about 9 times as many transactions per day, so each operation manages far more victims at once.
- Scams using off the shelf phishing kits are 688 times more effective in dollar terms than regular scams.
- Scams using bulk-bought social media accounts are 238 times more effective.
They also iterate faster than most product teams. A cloned site that gets removed reappears on a new domain the same afternoon. Creative that stops converting is swapped out, and AI makes new creative almost free. In our experience, when a fintech launches a new promotion, a new feature or a rebrand, copies follow within days.
How to compete: make their growth expensive
Takeaway
Scammers will keep investing in growth because it pays. The fintechs that hold up best treat impersonation as a market they compete in, and bring the same data, speed and discipline they apply to their own growth.
Fintechs are a special focus of ours at Unphish. Our job is to make cyber criminal’s growth stall so yours can keep going.