Fake ChatGPT tokens flooding the market as cryptocurrency scammers capitalize on AI hype
Due to ChatGPT's popularity, scammers have released a flood of unlicensed cryptocurrencies that appear to be associated with the chatbot that has fueled 2023's AI investing craze.
According to PeckShield, a blockchain security startup, dozens of so-called "BingChatGPT" coins have been newly minted. The tokens are intended to capitalize on Microsoft's new ChatGPT-powered Bing browser. The tech titan collaborated with OpenAI, the nonprofit that invented ChatGPT, to include that technology in its search tool.
"Deployer 0xb583 has already issued hundreds of tokens using a pump and dump method," PeckShield claimed, referring to the wallet address of an issuer.
ChatGPT's natural-language capability has piqued the interest of both retail investors and Wall Street, sparking an AI war among Big Tech companies. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives recently compared the contest between Microsoft, Google's parent Alphabet, and Apple to a "Game of Thrones" war.
According to CoinDesk, the most popular ChatGPT-branded token had a market valuation of more than R4.6 billion as of Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a search on the crypto trading platform DEXTools on Tuesday yielded 170 tokens bearing the ChatGPT name. The digital assets were distributed through decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and PancakeSwap.
The tokens are also arriving amid a broader recovery in cryptocurrency prices following a catastrophic drop in 2022. After losing more than 60% of its value last year, Bitcoin has increased by about 50% in 2023.
The ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which has taken the globe by storm since its debut, is the AI language-based model developed by the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI. The chatbot is free to use for users, but it can now only be accessed through web browsers.
It is built on a huge language model that is extremely capable of comprehending human language.
