I don’t totally understand the target audience here. I’m sure these scams work or they wouldn’t invest so much time in running them, but who is it that 1) is into crypto, 2) is aware of OpenAI the company and its leaders and 3) falls for this extremely basic give-me-your-wallet attack?
OpenAI is not some well kept secret. They are one of the most hyped companies of the past 10 years.
I think they meant that the people who know of and follow OpenAI probably know of crypto scams and can detect them, they're not oblivious grandpas
A lot of openAI followers are just people who listen to pop-tech podcasts or watch TikTok get-rich-quick schemes. It’s not limited to programmers in the same way crypto isn’t.
I interpreted "aware" in OP as if only people truly in the know were aware of OpenAI. A lot of oblivious grandpas have probably heard of ChatGPT at this point.
Another macro point, I don't know OP's age but this vision of Silicon Valley as a tiny subset of nerds in the shadows tinkering is way out of date. The biggest public companies on the planet are all here, and a lot of people have spent the last 10+ years trying to break into tech for the monetary rewards, especially among the terminally online crypto zealots who spend all day chasing the next get quick rich scheme, which just so happens to be AI applications currently.
A lot of these people are also fundamentally clueless.
When something similar happened to popular youtube channel Linus Tech Tips, the scammers gained a few thousand
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/11zhr9n/the_...
The LTT hacker ran the classic fake Elon Musk crypto livestream that scammers have been rehashing for years. It probably says something about the kind of person who reveres Musk that they're apparently known to be marks who will easily fall for the wallet inspector routine.
So you're saying scammers target Musk adherents for the same reason Nigerian Prince emails are rife with spelling errors.
Yes, targeting people who are oblivious to the blindingly obvious is a fantastic strategy for scammers.
more like hundreds of thousands of dollars, and unlike ransomware, the FBI and other law enforcement does not care, so it goes under the radar especially when less famous channels are hacked.
Sounds like a pretty common stereotype of somebody who wants to get rich quick.
Cynically, maybe comically, at what point are you more trying to influence a botnet out there?
Bring these questions (especially 1. and 2.) to r/wallstreetbets and check the answers yourself.
Techbros who are chasing the next get rich quick scheme and who often fail to question/critically evaluate dumb or blatantly false statements from their perceived figures of authority/celebrities.
All the same techbros who were into NFTs a couple of years back, and DAOs before that, and various Etherium shitcoins before that, and Bitcoin before that.
(And some of who are in leadership positions at OpenAI now.)
Actual tech workers aren’t getting scammed by this. It’s the people who think they are tech bros because they listen to podcasts about crypto and ai.
> who is it that 1) is into crypto, 2) is aware of OpenAI the company and its leaders and 3) falls for this extremely basic give-me-your-wallet attack?
A surprisingly enormous amount of people who are enthusiastic about the finance side but entirely clueless about the tech side.
My other thought would be automated trading algorithms — would they be able to distinguish between a real OpenAI post and a scammer hijacking the account?
Wide range of people using/following OpenAI. Just like any of the Amazon/Walmart/Google scams. This is no different.
It’s all a numbers game at this point.
The audience is anyone who invests in crypto, which is a lot of people and large overlap with fans of AI or users of Open Ai services.
I guess there's a significant audience of people who are interested in cryptocurrency but know nothing about it.
Even as someone who likes crypto, it seems like the push for "public acceptance" of cryptocurrency starting like 8 years ago was way too early and mostly caused by price action. I also blame the "steve jobs" imagery we always see associating technological development with mass adoption, It's clear that you have to develop the a strong basic use case first before marketing to users.
The time spent discussing poltics and price of crypto and onboarding new users would be better spent developing the core technology and creating simple real-world markets that use cryptocurrency. Instead, cryptocurrency is getting outmoded by the likes of "dumb" systems like CashApp and more competitive inter-bank systems like Plaid.
The mass of uneducated users in cryptocurrency space is a major problem because it does not allow the open-source development process to be democratic. That requires a userbase that is proactive about change and willing to undergo Hard-Forks that respect the users at large (against other interest groups like Miners, Owners, etc.).
>The mass of uneducated users in cryptocurrency space is a major problem
Maybe I'm too cynical, but from my perspective, the mass of uneducated users is literally by design. They are people who early adopters wanted in so the price would go up without too much hassle of really explaining what was happening. Something, something, bag holders?
Or am I incorrect?
The problem is that you are conflating the users with the owners. You can own cryptocurrency on an exchange or make a couple transactions to hold your funds in a wallet, but that is not really being a user.
Users use cryptocurrency for real transactions and ultimately derive actual economic value from the convenience of the network. If a cryptocurrency has a lot of users, the price will be more stable and the fee model will hold up in the long term. Users do not necessarily have a lot of funds.
Owners only get value by on-boarding more owners, so they can sell and stop being owners, which is ultimately zero-sum (actually less than zero-sum because someone has to pay the miners).
The problem with pretty much every cryptocurrency that exists is that there are more owners than users, and the owners have more power than users. But the long-term success of the system relies on users.
And there was that Worldcoin thing too.
Oh there’s a lot going on here -
On the scam url side of things: Sam Altman runs Worldcoin which caught on in the developing world, in some regards, despite the nonscam part of the product looking like a scam anyway. Worldcoin’s speculative value does move based on OpenAI news, not because people expect dividends or for a rich Sam to pump it, just because people want to. Developing nation sycophants are less discerning about urls. Developed nation sycophants exist too, or are lapsing in judgement at that time of day when it drops.
On the token side of things:
It has been incredibly lucrative to interact with projects without tokens. One of the main ways that tokens have been avoiding securities law issues since 2020 is to airdrop unpredictable amounts to users. What this means is that people who actually use the product or platform the most - with their funds and liquidity - get airdropped potentially disproportionate amounts of a potentially valuable token. They typically announce a “snapshot” date in the future, meaning that you have to get all your activity in early.
VC backed projects are the main ones doing this, and it has been even more lucrative to try and sybil attack these, because all of your addresses get rewarded.
People have earned millions of dollars worth of tokens, that, yes, they can immediately sell for millions of dollars. I probably made $80,000 from Uniswap airdrops in 2020, spending nothing and only using Uniswap for trading.
Scammers can take advantage of that by making a vague site you have to interact with, that drains your wallet instead of providing a service or dispensing a token. I understand that all three of those possibilities are considered a scam to people skeptical of the crypto industry. Only the draining violates the social contract and it is useful to differentiate if you want anything different to happen.
4) have to read X
... which seems to be maga only now and those seem to be quite into falling for crypto scams
I'm pretty sure that there is a considerable number of people who use X (formerly Twitter) who are not living in America and not MAGA.
Your comment is weirdly American-centric. Especially for HackerNews.
There are plenty of MAGA-like people here in Not-America, and like their MAGA counterparts, they do tend to congregate in the social media once known as Twitter.
There's a certain kind of ideological alignment there, as odd as it may be.
Yeah, I guess in my circles the term MAGA is abused to point at people who are not quite nazi's but want 'other stuff' but don't have the mental capacity to formulate what that is or how it would work (except racism and violence, but even that is not quite ... well ... coherent). For instance in my home country NL, my friends now group 'tokkies' (people who are rude, have a garbage heap in their garden and like to beat and shoot things) and 'wappies' (conspiracy nuts) as MAGA as it's the same kind of 1 braincell carrying kind of people.
I personally don't quite know how to handle them as it's basically more sad than anything; before the internet I didn't know that many of these people existed in my country. Let alone that they can get voted into government and make policy (well... policy... anyway). In the 80s we had 1 guy; JanMaat and he was a joke of a person; no-one took him in any way seriously, so there was no way extreme right would get anywhere with this slackjawed idiot at the helm. Now these people get voted in... How?
This is recurring a pattern of poor opsec on behalf of OpenAI; just today a scammer posted this on Sam Altman's personal website: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41628167
I agree that this is a problem with Twitter, sim swapping, and likely an insider at Twitter too.
However, what are you talking about with the article from Sam's website. He posted this.
What makes you think it's a scammer?
he is implying that sam altman himself is a scammer
Yeah, i assumed so.
Semi-off topic observation:
Does the prevalence of cryptocurrency-related scams point to the actual effectiveness and use-case of cryptocurrencies as a legitimate* means of value exchange?
Criminals and pornographers are often the acid-testers for new, fringe technologies.
*where legitimate is the ability to exchange value from one party to another, as opposed to the delivery method, ie. hacking / scamming.
There is clearly a crowd to provide financial services and entertainment to, and there is a large industry of people that do, while you debate it.
It is an incredibly lucrative industry that rivals and exceeds big tech compensation packages.
And that’s before stealing people’s funds, which is even more lucrative.
All because there is a crypto native audience already where the answer to your question is “yes”.
IMO the best litmus test of crypto is _it being in use_. Proof of stake was hard for me to understand, but it is sitting 'in production' and has beeen working for some time. In that same sense, if folks can use Bitcoin/Monero/coolNewCryptoCurrency to pay for illegal goods (drugs, etc.) and receive them back, then IMO that shows effectiveness for specific use-cases of value exchange.
Would I use bitcoin to buy a sandwich? No. Would I use it to do some weird spy stuff? Sure.
Nope!
I wonder how much it made. Probably a lot
Probably not much. As OP points out, this is not even the first time OA accounts have been hacked. It mentions the CTO and chief scientist and a top researcher already got hacked - and in fact, omits that the same researcher got hacked yesterday for a second time. (Yes, really. I have no idea how they all keep getting hacked by bottomfeeder cryptocurrency hackers. It doesn't speak well of OA's security, especially coming right after that congressional testimony...)
Grimace token in the McDonalds instagram account was way funnier
I like how they didn’t even spell the token right the first time. OPEANAI
Could just be rebranded WorldCoin.
The value of X is trending towards zero.
Trending towards negative.
> Crypto scammers hack OpenAI's press account on X
Haha. Blockchain against AI.
Scammers against scammers. /s