You might have heard of the latest AI buzzword, ChatGPT. If you're the curious type, you might have also done some research about what ChatGPT means. In case you don't know what it means, let's get a brief intro to what ChatGPT means.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence trained by OpenAI to assist users with a wide range of tasks and answer questions. It is also a general-purpose AI that is able to process and generate natural language text and is constantly learning to improve itself. To learn more about what ChatGPT is, check out this Medium article by Colin Baird here.
How Scammers are exploiting ChatGPT
Because of the opportunity that ChatGPT provides, some unscrupulous elements saw it as a way to defraud people. They created an app on Google Play for the AI chatbot, which looked legit enough at first glance.
Everything looks good and convincing until...
ChatGPT is currently free to try out and is in the research phase at chat.openai.com. The method employed by the scammers here is to bring up a payment wall and make you pay. If you look closely, there is a close icon at the top right corner and continue with limited version options on the screen shown. Those options are very inconspicuously placed, which is likely to direct users' psychology to click on the payment options they provided.
Upon proceeding to the chat itself, the replies are not ChatGPT standard replies, as can be found on chat.openai.com, which is to further accentuate that the fake ChatGPT app is a scam.
How to Protect Yourself
When you want to download anything online, the most common way to check if it is authentic is to read reviews and check the rating of the item you want to download. For this particular ChatGPT app, I read the reviews before downloading it. Based on what I discovered from the reviews and the rating, I suspected it is a ploy to scam people.
Also, when faced with a payment wall on any application, be sure that the service you are just about to pay for is verified and legit.
Conclusion
As with any popular product, people have started looking for ways to make money off ChatGPT. As a result, you must exercise extreme caution to avoid becoming a victim and being scammed. Thank you