Crypto scammers capitalize on the DeepSeek AI hype
As the AI world, together with all AI enthusiasts, is busy analyzing the latest Chinese artificial intelligence breakthrough, crypto scammers are busy trying to capitalize on this viral story.
Image by Getty/CFOTO
As the AI world, together with all AI enthusiasts, is busy analyzing the latest Chinese artificial intelligence breakthrough, crypto scammers are busy trying to capitalize on this viral story.
A quick reminder: this past weekend, the AI industry was astonished by the Chinese-developed AI agent DeepSeek, which is said to be as powerful as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The twist is that the Chinese claim they managed to develop this solution much cheaper than Western AI, which prompted the market to question the efficiency of Western AI technologies. At the same time, stock prices of some AI-related Western companies, such as Nvidia, crashed.
However, what has increased is the number of scam coins that have rushed to lure unsuspecting users into their criminal schemes.
For example, someone on the Solana (SOL) blockchain has launched the Seek token, which features the logo of DeepSeek—a blue whale. The price of this scam token has now gone down 83% in the past 24 hours, while the trading volume during the same period is almost $95 million. As per public data, this token now has more than 28,000 holders.
Another token on the Solana blockchain, which is known for millions of memecoins is DeepSeekAI, which also features the blue whale. For now, the token is up 196% in a day, with its 24-hour trading volume above $48 million. At the time of writing, it has more than 56,000 holders.
Meanwhile, even before the latest craze, earlier in January, the official X account of DeepSeek issued a warning, saying that they hadn’t issued any cryptocurrency and that they wouldn’t contact anyone through other accounts.
"Please stay vigilant and guard against potential scams," the team behind the project warned.
They also had to reiterate this warning today, stressing that any accounts other than the official one on X are impersonators.
Meanwhile, in the same thread, impersonators are trying to lure victims into the "only official Telegram Channel" of DeepSeek by misspelling the name of the project, e.g., "DeerpSreelk."