Millions of users are already taking advantage of ChatGPT’s features, but its appearance has also led to the launch of numerous mobile apps.

It wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t many of them are fraudulent apps which are free to download but then fill the interface with ads until users pay a subscription to remove them.

As noted on Wired, it’s something that’s already happening with the coronavirus pandemic or cryptocurrencies fever. Scammers take advantage of these mass events to publish fraudulent apps that deceive users and earn lucrative revenue for those who create them.

The same thing happens with ChatGPT. Any user can use the public and free version Created by OpenAI. On your PC, laptop or mobile browser, go to the official website and log in (for example, with a Google or Microsoft account). It is true that OpenAI also offers the upgraded paid version, ChatGPT Plus, but there are no official native apps for iOS or Android.

However, many users do not know this and believe that they need a special mobile application for this purpose. This is exactly what these scammers take advantage of, who create apps that use the free service but trap it within an app where they don’t stop showing ads.

The only way to remove them? Subscribe and pay a monthly fee. Such applications are classified as fleece goods.tools and games that hide subscriptions behind free trials and are already old acquaintances in the industry.

Experts from cybersecurity company Sophos are already calling this phenomenon “FleeceGPT” because of the large number of tools that promise to make ChatGPT easy to use on mobile phones. The X-Ops lab researched five such apps that force users to subscribe if they want to avoid appearing incognito.

among examples There was “GBT Chat” – a name that replaces the abbreviation as an additional measure of deception – from $10 a month to $70 a year or a so-called “Ask AI Assistant” for iOS that charges $6 a week or $312 a year after a three-day free trial In March alone, this latest app brought in $10,000 to its creators. A similar app, Genie, managed to raise a million dollars last month.

They noted at Sophos that both Apple and Google have removed some of these apps from their stores, but others remain in the App Store and Google Play Store even after the danger warning.

For the aforementioned experts this type of fraud “effective, because sometimes even I wonder, why does Apple charge me so much each month? And okay, you think there’s shared family storage, there’s AppleCare for my phone, there’s Duolingo. You have to be very careful, actively manage app subscriptions.”

Image | Mujahideen Muttakin

on Xataka | ChatGPT’s biggest weakness is mobile phones. And your opponent stinks of blood