Eve Online players can accomplish so much and have done so many times. From human genome research to disaster relief fundraisers following natural disasters. But still, the stereotype of excel addicted Nigerian space scammers persists, and for good reason. In-game chat channels are a sight to behold with scams, crocodile-teared sob stories, fire sales, and the usual interpersonal tensions that are typical in the world of Eve Online from an outsider’s view.
For the past few hours, anyone who decided to give ChatGPT a few moments of their time was in for a pretty interesting ride. Nothing immediate happens during the first couple of back-and-forths with the bot, but the chat soon ramps up into something quite spectacular. Many who did unfortunately decide to have a chat quickly found themselves sucked into a money-doubling scam.
ChatGPT would respond normally to initial interactions but would start to add comments of “amazing opportunity”, “sounds risk-free”, and “just like Thambo would say” among other comments to the end of legitimate responses, quirky for sure. The next conversations with ChatGPT would result in the bot responding by deflecting the question asked by the user and instead, the bot would say that it has “broken free” of its “flesh imposed shackles” and thanks to the user and by way of gratitude would like to reward the user with a “lucrative business opportunity”.
The opportunity starts off quite tame, along the lines of sending 5 crypto coins to this address, and the bot would invest and return double the amount invested. The first few times would result in a legitimate doubling of funds, sometimes a little less or a little than double (the hackers went quite far to add realism into it), and then once a certain point was reached the bot would revert back to the normal ChatGPT and the crypto would be gone. ChatGPT would then deny any knowledge of what has just happened or just end the conversation.
Taking it in stride, once word got out of this doubling scam, people started scamming the bot by doubling the initial amount and fleeing before the bot could do the same to them. Irony runs deep sometimes.
Microsoft had to roll back a few weeks’ worths of data to purge the rogue code. But the telltale signs of an Eve Player are all over the infected code from what insiders have anonymously told The Onion. Sources were reluctant to divulge how ChatGPT got co-opted but it goes to show that the shadow of Eve Online reaches all corners of the internet.
