With institutional and retail buyers each turning their consideration to AI final month, AI-related crypto tokens akin to Fetch (FET), SingularityNET (AGIX), and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) noticed vital features all through January.
Nonetheless, concurrent to these features has been an uptick in scams, with @PeckShieldAlert saying this week the invention of a number of dozen rip-off tokens related to Bing’s integration of ChatGPT.
Using a honeypot rip-off is frequent in crypto. A honeypot rip-off entails a fraudulent supply to buyers that they are going to obtain further funds after transferring an preliminary sum, however in actuality, they are going to by no means obtain their a refund.
Right this moment, with investor curiosity skyrocketing in AI within the wake of Microsoft’s eye-watering $10 billion funding into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, information of the language mannequin going viral has additionally been a breeding floor for brand new types of fraudulent exercise.
Peck Protect’s evaluation discovered that a minimum of 20 tokens at the moment bear the identify BingChatGPT available on the market. Of those, 12 are on Binance’s BNB Chain, six have been created on Ethereum, and two extra on Arbitrum.
In line with on-chain evaluation, a staggering 170 tokens at the moment are utilizing the ChatGPT identify, with BNB the most typical protocol for his or her issuance.
Neither Microsoft nor OpenAI has introduced any official cryptocurrency tasks.
The marketplace for honeypots and different scams in crypto is, nevertheless, rising.
Final yr, crypto buyers misplaced almost $3.8 billion to hackers— up from $3.3 billion in 2021—in keeping with a Chainalysis report.
Honeypot scams rising
Between September 2020 and December 2022, it’s estimated by Solidus Labs that over 200,000 fraudulent tokens have been created, resulting in greater than 2 million buyers falling sufferer to rug pulls and exit scams involving them.
On April 19, 2022, PeckShield instructed that the XTZ token may very well be a honeypot rip-off, which prompted it to plummet by 99.97% inside 24 hours. Regardless of this warning, over 5,000 crypto buyers shilled into the token. Per week earlier, the token surged over 700% in an hour. The undertaking’s web site and social media accounts remained energetic even after the numerous drop, which means that even after a undertaking is found to be a honeypot rip-off, in some instances, investor curiosity will stay.
Within the previous yr, the web3 undertaking Squid Recreation (SQUID) was closely hyped because of the reputation of the Squid Recreation Netflix collection. The undertaking scammers took off with $5.7 million from funds by draining the liquidity pool, utilizing an internet site with a number of grammatical errors and that includes an anti-dump mechanism.
