FSS upgrades AI to combat crypto manipulation

South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) is upgrading its AI-powered VISTA platform with additional Nvidia H100 GPUs to strengthen real-time detection of crypto market manipulation. The move is intended to sharpen surveillance of suspicious accounts and trading anomalies as regulators intensify oversight of virtual asset markets.

The FSS obtained a budget of 170 million Korean won ($117,640 USD) for internal server expansion this year, according to finance authorities on February 16. It intends to use this to acquire one more H100, a high-performance computing GPU from NVIDIA, by the second quarter of this year. The H100, released in 2022, is not the latest model but is one of the most widely used GPUs for AI training.

FSS upgrades AI to combat crypto manipulation

The FSS bought two H100s and obtained a 220 million Korean won ($152,240 USD) budget for server expansion last year. This enabled the agency to improve “VISTA,” a specialized AI platform launched in 2024 to investigate unfair virtual asset transactions.

According to the FSS, the new algorithm examines every potential sub-period in a trading record using a sliding-window grid search. The goal of this method is to enable a thorough examination of possible manipulation windows that investigators had to manually identify in the past.

The watchdog said that performance testing on completed investigation cases demonstrated that the technology identified all previously reported manipulation periods and flagged additional suspect intervals that were challenging to identify with traditional analysis.

A local news outlet stated that the agency’s goal for this year is to improve the platform’s capacity to identify questionable accounts utilized in coordinated market manipulation. It also aims to create a large language model (LLM) capable of analyzing messages that conspire to trade virtual assets unfairly.

The FSS is also reviewing the creation of an independent AI system to track real-time trends in the virtual asset market and spot anomalous transaction patterns. For example, the AI might identify abnormalities if the price of a significant virtual asset abruptly increased or decreased. Once this system is operational, it should be possible to promptly confirm whether unusual transactions were caused by technical issues at specific exchanges. Currently, the FSS reportedly receives virtual asset market trend data only once a day.

One insider from the FSS stated, “If further AI enhancements are deemed necessary, the agency will pursue additional GPU acquisitions.”

The AI improvement aligns with the regulator’s aim to enhance enforcement capabilities in the crypto space. On January 6, a local news outlet, Newsis, reported that the FSC was developing a payment suspension system that would stop transactions before suspects could launder ill-gotten funds.

South Korea flags a surge in crypto transactions

The watchdog said it is speeding up AI improvements as the number of suspected virtual asset transactions rises. The agency further stated that it is becoming more difficult to manually track capital transfers due to the increasing use of digital transaction methods.

A Cryptopolitan report, dated September 22, 2025, revealed that South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit flagged over 36,000 suspicious crypto transactions in 2025, a figure they claim had surpassed the total reported in 2023 and 2024.

Local virtual asset service providers filed 36,684 suspicious transaction reports (STRs) between January and August 2025, more than the 35,734 STRs reported in the two prior years, according to Yonhap News, citing data from the FIU and the Korea Customs Service (KCS).

FIU officials said there were only 199 flagged cases in 2021, 10,797 in 2022, 16,076 in 2023, and 19,658 in 2024. The previous record almost doubled in last year’s count.

According to customs officials, 9.56 trillion won, or roughly $7.1 billion, in cases involving virtual assets were referred to prosecutors between 2021 and August 2025. Approximately 90% of this, or 8.62 trillion won, was connected to “hwanchigi” scams, in which operators use cryptocurrency to transfer money abroad without going through banks.

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