AI is making cybercrime cheaper to run, not just easier to talk about. Underground sellers are packaging phishing, social engineering, malware help, and victim response into AI-assisted kits, so a small crew can do work that once took stronger language skills, more time, and a bigger team.
Sophos CTU saw that shift in dark-web forums, marketplaces, and messaging apps. Sellers are marketing tools that generate lures, translate them, handle back-and-forth with victims, and even create deepfake audio and video for romance fraud, while forum users worry those same tools will cut into the manual malware and scam work they used to sell.
For defenders, the change is more volume and more convincing abuse from less capable actors. Email, chat, and romance scams get cheaper to localize and faster to scale, so standard assumptions about attacker skill start to break.