Crypto scammers hack OpenAI’s press account on X

OpenAI’s official press account on X appears to have been compromised by the same cryptocurrency scammers who did the same with company leadership in previous months.

Late Monday afternoon, OpenAI Newsroom, an account OpenAI recently created to spotlight product- and policy-related announcements, posted about a supposedly new OpenAI-branded blockchain token, “$OPENAI.”

“We’re very happy to announce $OPEANAI [sic]: the gap between Al and blockchain technology,” the post read. “All OpenAI users are eligible to claim a piece of $OPENAI’s initial supply. Holding $OPENAI will grant access to all of our future beta programs.”

Of course, $OPENAI doesn’t exist — and the post on X linked to a phishing site designed to mimic the legitimate OpenAI website (minus the conspicuously incorrect URL “token-openai.com”). A prominent “CLAIM $OPENAI” button on the fake site encouraged unsuspecting users to connect their cryptocurrency wallets, likely in an attempt to steal those users’ login credentials.

As of publication time, both the post and site were still up — as was a repost and a reply promising “further information” about the token “[to] come later in the week.” Comments on the malicious X post were disabled, making the hack less obvious than it might be otherwise.

We’ve reached out to OpenAI and X for comment and will update this article if we hear back.

It’s not the first time accounts associated with OpenAI have been compromised as a part of phishing campaigns.

In June 2023, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s account posted a similar message promoting the fictional $OPENAI crypto token. And just three months ago, the accounts of OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and OpenAI researcher Jason Wei were hacked and used to publish scam posts identical to the post on the OpenAI Newsroom account today.

Coinspeaker, reporting on the hack of Murati’s account last June, said that the scammers used a “crypto drainer” tool that would funnel all the NFTs and tokens that victims had in their wallets to the scammers’ wallet once they signed into the fake OpenAI site.

Other high-profile X accounts belonging to tech companies and celebrities have been hacked in recent years to promote crypto scams. In perhaps the most infamous example, in 2020, hackers targeted accounts belonging to Apple, Elon Musk and Joe Biden to post the address of a bitcoin wallet with the claim that the amount of any payments made to the address would be doubled and sent back.

Americans lost $5.6 billion to cryptocurrency scams in 2023, a 45% increase from 2022, according to the FBI. 2024 is on track to be as bad — or worse. More than 50,000 scams were reported through the first half of this year, costing consumers close to $2.5 billion, per the FTC.