According to an official release, Sophos, a cybersecurity organisation, released new findings on CryptoRom scams, a subset of pig butchering (shā zhū pán) schemes made to trick users of dating apps into making fake cryptocurrency investments, which reported, “Sha Zhu Pan Scam Uses AI Chat Tool to Target iPhone and Android Users.” Since May, Sophos X-Ops has observed CryptoRom fraudsters refining their techniques, including adding an AI chat tool, such as ChatGPT, to their toolset.
With insights from the report, in 2022, investment fraud caused the highest losses of any scam reported by the public to the US FBI’s Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3), amounting to about US$3.31 billion in the US alone. It is expected that the fraud involving cryptocurrency, including pig butchering, represented most of these scams, increasing 183% from 2021 to US$2.57 billion in reported losses last year.
“One of the challenges for fraudsters with CryptoRom scams is making conversations of a romantic nature as these conversations are written by ‘keyboarders,’ who have a language barrier. Using ChatGPT might be an effective way to make scams less labour-intensive. It also enables keyboarders to engage with multiple victims at one time,” Sean Gallagher, principal threat researcher, Sophos, explained.
It has been found that there are about seven fake cryptocurrency investment apps in the official Google Play and Apple App stores, as per insights from an official release.