Blockchain
Use of AI in crypto scams not yet mainstream, but on the rise, says Elliptic report – DL News
- Artificial intelligence technology is new, but its use in crypto crime is on the rise.
- Celebrity deepfakes are being used to promote crypto scams.
According to a study, artificial intelligence (AI), despite being a technology in its infancy, is already being exploited for criminal acts in the cryptocurrency sector. relationship from British blockchain analytics firm Elliptic.
While AI-enhanced crypto crime may not yet be a widespread threat, identifying emerging trends is important for sustainable innovation, the report says.
Cryptocurrency investment scams have recently made use of deepfakes of celebrities and authority figures to promote themselves.
Among others, video images of Elon Musk and former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong was used in such scams.
DL News reported earlier this month a social media ad featuring video of Lee selling cryptocurrency investments was a deepfake that overlaid fake audio over video of a speech he gave earlier this year.
“This is extremely worrying: People watching the video could be fooled into thinking that I actually said those words,” Lee said in a Post on Facebook. “The video is not real!”
AI is also a hype generator for scam tokens, the Elliptic report says.
For example, there are hundreds of tokens listed on blockchains that have some variation of the term “GPT” in their name. Some may be the product of legitimate ventures, but Elliptic said it has identified numerous scams among them.
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Threat actors
The report notes that there is an ongoing debate about whether AI tools can be used for code auditing and bug checking, and whether black hat hackers can use such capabilities to identify and engineer hack attacks.
Although Microsoft and OpenAI have reported cases of Russian and North Korean attackers engaging in such attempts, others suggest their technology is not yet fully developed, according to the Elliptic report.