OpenAI’s X account pushed a fake token as crypto scams soar in the US
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Posting through it… Scammers took over one of OpenAI’s X accounts this week and used it to hype a fake “$OPENAI” token. The gold-checkmarked account shared links to an OpenAI look-alike site seemingly designed to steal users’ crypto. The bogus pitch: OpenAI users could claim a free token that’d grant them access to future beta projects. The posts were up for at least an hour, and came the same day that OpenAI reportedly warned employees that hackers were targeting their socials.
Tried and (un)true: This week’s X hack wasn’t a first for OpenAI. Its chief scientist’s and CTO’s X accounts had been taken over before.
Trump card: Companies haven’t been the only targets in a slew of X breaches. Lara and Tiffany Trump’s X accounts were hacked recently to post crypto-scam links.
Bursting the social bubble… Crypto fraudsters aren’t just on social media. Earlier this month the FBI released a report detailing the $5.6B it said Americans lost last year to crypto-related fraud (a 45% year-over-year jump). The FBI said it got 69K+ crypto-related complaints, and that folks lost $3.9B to investment fraud (including “pig butchering” scams). Plus, an FTC report this month said consumers lost $110M to bitcoin-ATM scams last year — up nearly 10x since 2020.
The cutting edge can leave some scarred… Consumers are often less familiar with new tech like crypto and AI, making those industries more appealing targets for scammers. In the case of OpenAI, scammers took advantage of investors’ hunger to get in on the AI boom. Bitcoin hodler MicroStrategy, cybersecurity firm Mandiant, and even ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin all recently had their X accounts hacked to push crypto scams.