When Daniel Abbott first heard about the nonprofit Intelligence for Good during a guest lecture in one of his cybersecurity classes at Samford University, he saw an opportunity to use his technical skills to help protect people from online crime.
Now, Abbott is helping lead efforts to identify and disrupt cryptocurrency investment scams through a fully autonomous artificial intelligence system he designed himself.
Abbott, who will begin his senior year at Samford this fall, became involved with Intelligence for Good after Sam Mabry, the organization’s program manager, visited instructor Scott Crews’ Cybersecurity Governance, Risk and Compliance class. Inspired by the presentation, Abbott volunteered to help identify scam websites and report malicious cryptocurrency wallet addresses connected to fraudulent activities.
“I began finding crypto investment scam websites and manually reporting all of the malicious crypto addresses displayed on them,” Abbott said. “These wallet addresses get reported to the FBI and Secret Service as well as crypto exchange companies like Coinbase, and they block the wallet so nobody can send funds to them.”
What started as manual investigative work soon evolved into something much larger.
Abbott developed a program that autonomously identifies cryptocurrency scam websites, uncovers related fraudulent domains and extracts malicious wallet addresses without requiring human intervention.
“At a very high level, my program autonomously finds crypto investment scam websites and uses numerous tools to pivot off those sites to find thousands of similar scam websites,” Abbott said. “After confirming we have found a scam website, I have a custom-built AI agent visit the site, register an account and extract all the malicious crypto deposit addresses available.”
The system has dramatically increased the efficiency of Intelligence for Good’s efforts to combat online fraud.
“This has helped the team immensely because it is fully autonomous,” Abbott said. “Every step of the process—from finding the sites to extracting the wallets—does not require any human intervention to be successful.”
Crews said Abbott’s work demonstrates how quickly emerging technologies are reshaping the cybersecurity landscape.
“Daniel’s work was particularly impressive,” Crews said. “By using some clever methods and leading-edge technologies, he was able to build a program that could address the problem at scale and deliver results that wouldn’t have been possible even 12 months ago.”
According to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics for Intelligence for Good, the scale of online cryptocurrency fraud has grown dramatically in recent years.
“In the FBI’s Internet Crime Report that came out in April, they shared that in 2025, they received complaints of $8.6 billion stolen from crypto investment scams,” Warner said. “Nothing else even comes close to the amount of money stolen by this type of scam.”
Warner said cryptocurrency-related fraud now accounts for more than half of all funds reported stolen to the FBI.
“The only way law enforcement can know the Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT addresses that the stolen funds are sent to is for someone to tell them,” Warner said.
To help combat the problem, Intelligence for Good launched its ScamBusters project, which includes 160 students from 13 universities working to identify and report scam-related cryptocurrency wallets to the FBI, U.S. Secret Service and major cryptocurrency exchanges.
“The intelligence helps law enforcement prioritize cases, seize websites and block payments,” Warner said. “When a victim tries to send funds to the criminals, believing they are making a safe investment, their payments may be blocked based on this intelligence.”
Among those students, Abbott’s work has stood out.
“Since January, all students on all teams have found 8,254 cryptocurrency addresses,” Warner said. “Daniel found more than 2,270 of those.”
Warner added that Abbott currently holds the project’s “platinum badge” for identifying more malicious cryptocurrency wallet addresses than any other student involved in the initiative.
“While many students are visiting each site manually and cutting and pasting the addresses they find there, Daniel instead spent the time to teach his A.I. program how to do that for him, and the results are outstanding,” Warner said.
On May 4 alone, Abbott identified 232 previously unknown cryptocurrency wallet addresses connected to scams.
“Just those addresses had received more than $5 million in payments by people who believed they were making an investment, but were actually sending their money to overseas criminals,” Warner said.
At least seven of those wallet addresses had each received more than $100,000 from victims, including one account that had collected more than $734,000 in fraudulent payments.
“That information has all been shared with law enforcement now,” Warner said.
For Abbott, however, the work is about more than technology.
“The most rewarding part of this project is knowing that every crypto wallet address I report possibly prevents someone from falling for a scam and losing their life savings,” Abbott said. “The thought that I could possibly save a life with the wallets I report is what keeps me motivated to continue.”
Abbott credits Samford with helping prepare him both professionally and spiritually for the work he is doing.
“Samford has provided me with amazing connections and has continuously reminded me to trust where the Lord takes me, no matter what situation I may be in,” Abbott said.
This summer, Abbott will continue developing his cybersecurity experience through an internship with Blue Cross Blue Shield, where he hopes to learn how large organizations implement security measures and automation to defend complex systems.
“The internship connects directly to my passion for defending people against malicious actors, just on an enterprise scale,” he said.
Abbott’s experience also reflects the opportunities and career preparation available to Samford students through hands-on learning, industry partnerships and emerging technology initiatives. In The Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2026 Best Colleges in the U.S. rankings, Samford was recognized as the No. 3 university nationally for quality of career preparation and No. 7 nationally for strongest learning opportunities. The university also earned three overall top-10 rankings, further highlighting Samford’s growing reputation as one of the nation’s leading Christian universities.
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