Hundreds of fake ChatGPT tokens lure crypto punters, majority issued on BNB chain
Dodgy market participants are trying to cash in on the ongoing ChatGPT craze in tech circles by issuing fake tokens branded after the AI chatbot despite having no official affiliation with the tool.
Hundreds of such tokens have been issued in recent weeks. Of this, 132 different tokens have been issued on the BNB Chain, 25 tokens on Ethereum, and ten separate tokens on other blockchains, such as Solana, Arbitrum, OKChain and Cronos.
These fake issuances follow software giant Microsoft’s move to integrate OpenAI’s chatbots for search services on Microsoft’s browsers.
While OpenAI is the creator of ChatGPT – Microsoft’s own chatbot is a custom tool and is said to be an improvement over the publicly available ChatGPT.
Scammers, however, don’t waste a chance to cash in on the hype. Several “BingChatGPTs” have been issued, seeded with liquidity, and are seeing thousands of dollars in trading volume – despite red flags.
“PeckShield has discovered dozens of newly created #BingChatGPT tokens, 3 of which appear to be #honeypots and 2 have high sales tax,” blockchain security firm Peckshield said in a tweet on Monday.
“2 of them have already dropped above -99%. Deployer 0xb583 has already created dozens of tokens with a pump & dump scheme,” Peckshield added, referring to the wallet address of the malicious issuer of these tokens.
In cryptocurrency, honeypots are smart contracts that pretend to leak their money to an arbitrary user, provided the user sends additional funds to it.
On the other hand, turnover fee refers to the intentional amount taken from an illegal smart contract when a related token is sold – usually amounting higher than 50%, meaning that a user who sells a token worth $100 receives only $50 worth , with the remaining “taxed” amount going to the developer of the smart connector.
At the time of writing on Tuesday, there are over 170 ChatGPT-branded tokens issued on decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and PancakeSwap, data from DEXTools shows.
The most popular has a market cap of over $250 million, with over 300 unique owners and $600,000 in liquidity and is issued on Ethereum. A separate BNB Chain version has $246,000 in liquidity and a market cap of $24 million.
Trading volumes of such fake tokens – and fraud in some cases – is a glimpse that the cryptosponding dream is alive and well.
