ChatGPT’s popularity has sparked a surge in mobile scams

The trend for artificial intelligence and neural networks, in addition to simplifying life in various areas of human activity, has also led to the rapid growth of various fraud.

Company Sophos last Wednesday published a report demonstrating that app stores Apple And Google flooded dozens of programs mentioning ChatGPT In the title. However, most of them are nothing more than simple tricks with a ton of advertising. Such applications claim to connect directly to the revolutionary ChatGPT API from Open AI. And a lot of people actually do that. However, the lion’s share of such applications perform very badly, but their developers do not hesitate to charge users for maintenance, when as a public version of a large language model it is absolutely free to use.

Some apps lure users in with a “free trial”, which then charges a hefty monthly fee through App Store or Google Play. One such application that Sophos tested was called “Chat GBT”. It was advertised as “free”, but after three requests, it limited its functionality and offered to sign up for a three-day free trial, which gradually develops into a $10 per month Pro subscription. There was also an annual subscription for $30, which is usually much more beneficial for the developer. After all, people often forget that they have subscriptions to applications that they rarely use. Especially when the interval between payments is a whole year.

Another app, GAI Assistant, worked similarly to Chat GBT, but instead of $10 a month, it charged $6 a week. The funny thing is that this app didn’t even work properly. All chatbot responses were limited to a couple of lines and were accompanied by a “Read More” button leading to the paid subscription registration screen. Despite the obvious fraudulent nature of the app, Sensor Tower reported that the app made nearly $5,000 on Android and over $10,000 on iOS in March. This is despite hundreds of negative reviews warning people of a clear scam. The researchers noted that the “GAI Assistant” still began to function adequately after paying for a subscription, however, $ 6 per week is quite a lot for a product that is available absolutely free on the official OpenAI website.

Applications that seek to earn on free ChatGPT

Of the six applications mentioned by Sophos, another called “Genie” worked more or less correctly even without a subscription, but was also limited to four requests per day. So the developers encourage users to subscribe, which at Genie is $ 7 per week or $ 70 per year. The app is rife with positive reviews and, according to the same Sensor Tower, the developers of “Genie” earned about $700,000 in April alone. That’s really, really, a goldmine, and from scratch.

Sophos noted that both Google and Apple have acted fairly quickly and have already removed some apparently fraudulent apps just for the developer’s profit, but the “GAI Assistant” and “Genie” mentioned above are still available for download at the time of publication.