Other tactics deployed to convey legitimacy include using bot accounts to leave positive comments on posts published by the fake pages.
Read our guide to the latest AI scams and how to avoid them
Protecting Yourself: Recognizing The Scams
If you ended up clicking through on one of these scams – as Checkpoint did during their investigation – you would have had infostealers such as Doenerium or libb1.py forcibly downloaded onto your device and your personal data immediately sent to a Discord server.
Even though this is quite a sophisticated scam and the perpetrators have taken a lot of steps to ensure that victims do not suspect a thing, there are still some elements of it that indicate it might not be what it seems – and being able to spot these things can save your skin.
The promise of “enhanced” versions of chatbots, for example, should ring alarm bells, regardless of how legitimate a page looks. A quick Google Search will tell you that these tools don’t actually exist.
It’s also good to remember what doesn’t confirm something online is legitimate. Links to legitimate companies can be added to any website, for instance. Bot accounts are pretty easy to acquire too, so a flood of positive comments doesn’t really mean anything.
If you want to use an AI chatbot like Bard or ChatGPT, your safest bet is to go to Google and find the real version of the website, rather than attempting to visit it through a link on social media or through a messaging app like Whatsapp, which is also a hotbed for scams.
When something as big as AI comes along, scammers are going to jump on it – so treat opportunities and offers that look like they’re jumping on the bandwagon with caution.
