TRM Labs identified a network of at least nine near-identical YouTube tutorials, fronted by AI-generated hosts, that promised to teach viewers how to build an automated crypto arbitrage bot using Claude. Viewers who followed the videos copied and deployed a smart contract that contained no trading logic and instead forwarded any deposited funds directly to the scammers, draining 274.6 ETH (about $517,000) from at least 224 victims between February and August 2026. Claude was named only in the scam’s marketing; Anthropic’s model was not actually used to build or operate the fraudulent contracts.