A hacking incident has compromised Open AI’s official press account on X. Cryptocurrency scammers have taken over the victim’s account to issue statements of fraudulent content. OpenAI Newsroom was the name given to that account when it was opened to post all updates about the company’s products and policies.
On Monday afternoon, the hacked account began posting fraudulent tweets about an OpenAI-branded blockchain token, “$OPENAI,” which did not exist. In the fake post, the company announced that it was releasing the new cryptocurrency and promised the users that they would receive a share of the initial supply of the token. It also falsely claimed that holding $OPENAI would grant access to future beta programs from the company.
Importantly, there is no such thing as an $OPENAI token. The message had a link to a phishing site that impersonated the official OpenAI website, but with an obviously wrong URL: “token-openai.com”. A big button labeled “CLAIM $OPENAI” on the phony website invited users to attach their crypto wallets, which were very likely used to steal credentials.
At the time of reporting, the deceptive post and the phishing website it linked to were still live. The post had been reshared, with a reply that more information on the token would follow later in the week. What’s more, comments on the malicious post had been turned off, obscuring the scam even more as one where the account was hacked.
This is not an isolated incident; phishing scams related to OpenAI accounts have happened before. As recently as June 2023, the X account of OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati was compromised, promoting the scam $OPENAI token. Only three months back, the accounts of OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and his researcher Jason Wei were also hacked to spread the same scam messages.
Such cases of hacking have been increasing daily, especially for high-profile X accounts of technology companies and celebrities. For example, in 2020, hackers compromised several popular accounts, such as those of Apple, Elon Musk, and Joe Biden, among others, to send out a Bitcoin scam promising to return double the amount of any payments sent to a particular Bitcoin wallet.
There have been increasing financial threats due to cryptocurrency scams. For example, last year, Americans reportedly lost $5.6 billion to cryptocurrency scams, a staggering increase of 45 percent from the year before. According to the FBI, the incidence of scams could be even higher in 2024, with more than 50,000 being reported for the first half of this year alone, losses amounting to almost $2.5 billion, according to the FTC.
