SlowMist said an old trading bot scam has been rebranded to capitalize on the excitement around artificial intelligence, and more and more users are falling victim to the scam.

In an October 13 Medium post, SlowMist explained that cybercriminals are adapting to popular topics by adding OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the names of their scam bots.

Fake bots formerly marketed as “Uniswap Arbitrage MEV Bot” have now been renamed “ChatGPT Arbitrage MEV Bot”.

“By attaching the ChatGPT label to their scams, they manage to attract attention and make them appear more trustworthy,” the company wrote.

By claiming to have used ChatGPT to create the bot’s code, scammers are trying to reduce users’ suspicions by arguing that there is no malicious intent in the code. SlowMist stated that scammers are luring users with the promise of a trading bot that promises to make huge profits by tracking new tokens on Ethereum and significant price fluctuations.

Victims are encouraged to create a MetaMask wallet and click on a fake link on the open source platform Remix. Once the code is copied and the bot is deployed, users are said to need to deposit funds to “activate” the smart contract.

“The greater the amount of ETH deposited, the larger the so-called profits. But once the user clicks the ‘start’ button, the deposited ETH disappears — transferred to the fraudster’s wallet via a backdoor secretly built into the smart contract,” SlowMist wrote.

“Emerging funds are either transferred directly to exchanges or moved to temporary storage addresses,” the company said. SlowMist said it found three different scam addresses that were scamming users using these techniques.

Since August, one of them has stolen 30 Ether (more than $78,000) from more than 100 victims. Two other scammers stole 20 Ether (more than $52,000) from 93 victims.

SlowMist said fraudsters use a “wide-net” tactic, meaning they steal small amounts from multiple victims, and many of the victims fail to make the necessary effort to recover the stolen funds. “Because individual losses are relatively small, many victims do not have the time or resources necessary to obtain justice,” SlowMist wrote.

“This allows fraudsters to continue operating and often rebrand the scam under a new name,” he said.

According to the blockchain security firm, the internet, especially YouTube, hosts many videos promoting such scams.

Red flags that indicate the video is promoting a scam include audio and video being out of sync or showing outdated footage from another source.

It may also be a warning sign if there are many comments at the top of the comment section of the video praising and thanking the scam, but later comments stating that the scheme is a scam.