Blockchain Security Firm PeckShield Uncovers New Crypto Scam That Pretends To Be Affiliated With ChatGPT

Sead Fadilpašić
Last updated: | 2 min read
Source: AdobeStock / JeromeMaurice

Blockchain security firm PeckShield has found a number of scam tokens looking to profit from the ChatGPT AI chatbot craze. 

PeckShield tweeted on Tuesday that, 

“[It] detected dozens of newly created BingChatGPT tokens, of which 3 appear to be honeypots & 2 have high sell tax.”

A honeypot is a popular type of scam whereby a malicious actor creates a fake crypto or crypto wallet to lure victims into investing, sending, or trading crypto. The scammer often poses as a legitimate business or organization, promising services or rewards.

Sales tax is the amount of money a smart contract takes once a token is sold. Many legitimate projects use sales tax as a means to incentivize long-term holding as well as rewards for token holders.

However, scam projects use high taxes, oftentimes set at 100%, to steal money from unsuspecting users.

PeckShield added that two of these coins had, by that point, already dropped nearly 100%. Another one fell by some 65%. 

The security firm noted that these coins appear to be typical pump and dump schemes, whereby the price of a coin is artificially ‘pumped’, usually via misleading statements, before selling – aka ‘dumping’ – a large number of coins at a higher price. 

In this case, the projects claimed to be affiliated with ChatGPT – a chatbot developed by the American AI research laboratory OpenAI

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it was “launching an all-new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser,” leveraging its partnership with OpenAI. The tech giant stated that “the new Bing is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search.”

And while the craze around ChatGPT continues, so will the scams looking to profit from it – and users need to research each and every coin they want to put their money into. Looking at the data provided by DEXTools, for example, some 20 ‘BingChatGPT’ coins have been issued on BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Arbitrum. These show thousands of dollars in trading volume. 

And that’s not all. There are a whopping 175 coins called ‘ChatGPT’, as shown by the website. The vast majority, or 136 of these, have been issued on BNB Chain, 22 on Ethereum, 8 on Arbitrum, and the rest on OKC, Polygon, Solana, Cronos, EthereumPoW, and Fantom. These have supposedly hundreds of thousands of dollars in liquidity. 

Source: DEXTools (February 22, 10:00 UTC)

Out of these, at the time of the writing (Wednesday, 10 UTC), the first one on the list has $457.9 million in market capitalization. The data further shows 319 holders, $180,910 in 24h volume, and $614,240 in liquidity. 

Where there are people, there is money, and where there is money, there are scammers. You can read more about various scams in the crypto-world below.

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