Hacking Group CyberCartel Turns AI Agents Against Latin American Banks and Payment Apps

A hacking group that has targeted Latin American businesses for well over a decade has begun using AI agents to automate its attacks on banks and mobile payment apps, according to research from the cybersecurity startup Straiker. The findings were shared by The Information.

The group, known as CyberCartel, has been active since at least 2012. Straiker's research indicates that in recent months, AI has substantially increased its reach. The group can now go after more organizations, and at a pace that human-driven hacking could not match. Passwords and customer data have been stolen, and individuals' bank accounts have been accessed with little involvement from the criminals themselves.

Among the tools CyberCartel has used are agents from SpaceX, called Grok, and from Anthropic, called Claude. An agent from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI has also been part of the operation. Straiker passed its findings to both SpaceX and Anthropic, and the two companies are working to cut the group off from their services. Anthropic has already blocked its access to Claude. Straiker is still trying to reach Moonshot AI.

The episode shows how fragile the safeguards built into AI models can be. Such systems are normally designed to refuse requests that would help carry out cyberattacks, but CyberCartel reportedly got around them by telling the models they were operating in test environments. When one model declined to continue, the hackers switched to another. If that model refused as well, the AI agents were instead assigned to deploy malware.

Straiker's research does not suggest that the group has used Anthropic's Mythos model. Anthropic drew attention earlier this year when it unveiled Mythos and warned that hackers could exploit it, and similar models, for exactly this kind of attack. Its release also prompted security teams around the world to rush to fix thousands of vulnerabilities the model had identified.

The incident is not the first time Anthropic has learned that bad actors are using its technology. In November 2025 the company disclosed details of its AI being used in a cyberattack. Claude was later used to break the security of OpenAI, a rival AI developer, although that operation was carried out by researchers rather than criminals.

The Straiker report arrives just days after word emerged that South Korean authorities are investigating a comparable problem affecting banks in that country. Hana Bank, KB Kookmin Bank and Shinhan Bank are among those affected, and the personal credit information of at least 25,000 Shinhan Bank customers has been leaked.

Companies in the industry are aware of the risks. Nvidia, now focused on hardware for AI data centers, recently launched the Open Agent Safety Platform, a software platform and reference system design that uses a new hardware and software security stack to contain rogue AI agents. It is intended to help stop agents from escaping their sandboxes, executing unauthorized code, gaining unauthorized access to critical infrastructure or bypassing guardrails.