With institutional and retail buyers each turning their consideration to AI final month, AI-related crypto tokens resembling Fetch (FET), SingularityNET (AGIX), and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) noticed vital positive factors all through January.
Nevertheless, concurrent to these positive factors 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.
The usage of a honeypot rip-off is frequent in crypto. A honeypot rip-off entails a fraudulent provide to buyers that they’ll obtain additional funds after transferring an preliminary sum, however in actuality, they’ll by no means obtain their a refund.
Right now, 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 Defend’s evaluation discovered that a minimum of 20 tokens at present bear the title BingChatGPT in the marketplace. Of those, 12 are on Binance’s BNB Chain, six have been created on Ethereum, and two extra on Arbitrum.
In response to on-chain evaluation, a staggering 170 tokens are actually utilizing the ChatGPT title, with BNB the most typical protocol for his or her issuance.
Neither Microsoft nor OpenAI has introduced any official cryptocurrency initiatives.
The marketplace for honeypots and different scams in crypto is, nevertheless, rising.
Final yr, crypto buyers misplaced practically $3.8 billion to hackers— up from $3.3 billion in 2021—based on a Chainalysis report.
Honeypot scams rising
Between September 2020 and December 2022, it’s estimated by Solidus Labs that over 200,000 fraudulent tokens had been created, resulting in greater than 2 million buyers falling sufferer to rug pulls and exit scams involving them.
On April 19, 2022, PeckShield prompt that the XTZ token might be a honeypot rip-off, which precipitated it to plummet by 99.97% inside 24 hours. Regardless of this warning, over 5,000 crypto buyers shilled into the token. Every 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, that means that even after a undertaking is found to be a honeypot rip-off, in some circumstances, investor curiosity will stay.
Within the previous yr, the web3 undertaking Squid Recreation (SQUID) was closely hyped as a result of recognition of the Squid Recreation Netflix collection. The undertaking scammers took off with $5.7 million from funds by draining the liquidity pool, utilizing a web site with a number of grammatical errors and that includes an anti-dump mechanism.
