Highlights:

  • The chatbot then asked a series of questions about money, such as the researchers’ current income, before asking them to type in their email addresses.
  • All people who use the internet should be especially careful about investment schemes that claim to be from ChatGPT since they are all scams.

The rise of predictive artificial intelligence and chatbots like OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT has been well-documented. What hasn’t been as well-documented is the rise of scams trying to take advantage of the hype in the sector.

Researchers at S.C. Bitdefender SRL recently released a new report about the rise of high-tech investment scams and how they’re trying to take advantage of the buzz around ChatGPT to trick people.

The “AI-powered” scams usually start with unsolicited emails with subject lines like “New ChatGPTchatbot is make [sic] everyone crazy now – but it’ll very soon be as mundane a tool as Google” or “ChatGPT: New AI bot has everyone going crazy about it”. The emails usually have fake OpenAI and ChatGPT graphics to make them look like real emails.

When users click on the link in the email, they are taken to a fake version of ChatGPT that promises them financial opportunities that pay up to USD 10,000 per month “on the unique ChatGPT platform.” The fake platform’s “chatbot” starts with a short explanation of how it can help anyone become a successful investor in global stocks by analyzing financial markets.

The researchers agreed to go along with the fake ChatGPT site and let the “automatic robot created by Elon Musk” help them get rich. The chatbot then asked a series of questions about money, such as the researchers’ current income, before asking them to type in their email addresses. After a few more questions, the bot said that the researchers could make an estimated USD 420 a day or even more, and then it asked for more information to make a “personal assistant” to turn on a WhatsApp account that was only used to make money.

At this point, it seems like a typical data theft, where criminals try to get people to give them their personal information so they can use it in other ways. But then things changed. After the bot told the researchers that someone from their company would contact them in about 10 minutes, someone did. Over the phone, the representative gave the person more information about how to make money by investing in “crypto, oil, and international stock.”

At some point in the scam, the person on the phone will ask the victim to send USD 266. After giving a fake credit card number, the experiment ended because no payment was made.

The researchers said, “Scammers using new viral internet tools or trends to defraud users is nothing new. If you’re looking to test out the official ChatGPT and its AI-powered text-generating abilities, do so only using the official website.”

The researchers also say that people should never click on links in emails they didn’t ask for. All people who use the internet should be especially careful about investment schemes that claim to be from ChatGPT since they are all scams.