With institutional and retail traders each turning their consideration to AI final month, AI-related crypto tokens resembling Fetch (FET), SingularityNET (AGIX), and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) noticed important 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.
Using a honeypot rip-off is frequent in crypto. A honeypot rip-off entails a fraudulent provide to traders that they may obtain additional funds after transferring an preliminary sum, however in actuality, they may by no means obtain their a reimbursement.
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 Protect’s evaluation discovered that not less than 20 tokens presently bear the identify BingChatGPT in the marketplace. Of those, 12 are on Binance’s BNB Chain, six have been created on Ethereum, and two extra on Arbitrum.
Based on on-chain evaluation, a staggering 170 tokens are actually utilizing the ChatGPT identify, with BNB the commonest 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, growing.
Final yr, crypto traders misplaced almost $3.8 billion to hackers— up from $3.3 billion in 2021—in accordance with a Chainalysis report.
Honeypot scams growing
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 traders falling sufferer to rug pulls and exit scams involving them.
On April 19, 2022, PeckShield recommended 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 traders shilled into the token. Every week earlier, the token surged over 700% in an hour. The challenge’s web site and social media accounts remained energetic even after the numerous drop, which means that even after a challenge is found to be a honeypot rip-off, in some instances, investor curiosity will stay.
Within the previous yr, the web3 challenge Squid Sport (SQUID) was closely hyped because of the recognition of the Squid Sport Netflix sequence. The challenge 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.
