Murati’s account tweeted a phishing link advertising an airdrop of an ERC-20 token.
The tweet was up for nearly an hour, during which time it was seen 79,600 times.
On June 2, Twitter was inundated with user complaints about a “scam” crypto airdrop that seemed to have been promoted via the account of Mira Murati, CTO of artificial intelligence business OpenAI. Murati’s account seemed to tweet a phishing link advertising an airdrop of an ERC-20 token, which was shown as produced by the company behind ChatGPT.
Moreover, Murati’s Twitter account is verified and has 126,200 followers. The tweet was up for nearly an hour, during which time it was seen 79,600 times and retweeted 83 times. The tweet’s creator had disabled replies, making it difficult for other users to sound the alarm that the link led to fraud.
Luring Visitors to Connect Wallet
The website linked to in the tweet is quite professional and seems to be an exact copy of the design and layout of a legitimate project called ChainGPT, with only minor changes, most notably the addition of a prompt to connect a cryptocurrency wallet.
Furthermore, the site “lures visitors into signing requests,” according to a security researcher from blockchain security company Beosin. Upon signing the exploited will transfer NFTs and ERC-20 tokens from the wallet of the victims.
Murati is the chief technical officer of OpenAI and oversees the development of popular AI tools including the chatbot ChatGPT and the art-generating AI system DALL-E.
When ChatGPT was out in late November, it became an instant hit. Google was worried that the technology may disrupt its search business, while Microsoft made a $10 billion investment in the firm. In reply, Google announced the launch of a similar AI service, Bard.