The success of ChatGPT leads to the appearance of fake apps pretending to be the real AI with paid subscriptions, personal data collection and numerous advertisements. Deceptive clones, only made to scam.

The success of ChatGPT leads to the appearance of fake apps pretending to be the real AI with paid subscriptions, personal data collection and numerous advertisements. Deceptive clones, only made to scam.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s incredible conversational AI, appeals to everyone: students, coders, journalists, artists, developers… People from all sectors of activity strive to push the tool to its limits and discover the crazy uses it could have. Unfortunately, if some have seized its open source code to participate in its development for free, in particular by developing new tools or an application to identify texts generated by AI – and thus help to fight against cheating and other trickery – it didn’t take long before some were looking to exploit this technology for malicious purposes. Many hackers seek to use it to easily create malicious code and develop new attacks, while others use AI to enrich their fake profiles on dating sites or their phishing campaigns. Hackers have also decided to clone it. Thus, ChatGPT mobile applications are multiplying on the Play Store and the App Store in order to seize users’ personal data, and some of them do not hesitate to offer expensive subscriptions or to flood users with advertisements. . A shame when you know that the official Web version is totally free!

ChatGPT: third-party applications that deceive the user

As a reminder, OpenAI’s AI (the official one) is available free of charge and for everyone via a web browser. To take advantage of it, all you have to do is create an account. Note that, ChatGPT being still in beta version and in high demand, it has many bugs and it is sometimes necessary to go about it several times to obtain the desired answers. If it is possible to download it on a computer, it is not yet accessible in the form of a mobile application, contrary to what some would have us believe. Top10VPN looked into the problem and discovered no less than 100,000 downloads on Android devices alone for apps accessible simply by searching for “ChatGPT” in the Play Store.

The researchers analyzed the ten top-ranked fake apps on the two official stores. While most of them are indeed based on the ChatGPT-3 language model, on which the real ChatGPT is based, what they discovered is clear. Thus, two Android applications collect users’ IP addresses to share them with third parties. This is particularly the case of ChatGPT AI Writing Assistant, which collects the geolocation data of its victims to transmit them to companies such as ByteDance (which owns TikTok) and Amazon. Three other applications ask users for access to audio files, three offer a paid subscription – remember that ChatGPT is free… – while all of them contain a code directly targeting the privacy of victims by accessing geolocation, device photos, photos and videos, and internal device storage. And this without the users having given their authorization! Here are the culprits to uninstall urgently:

On the normally so secure iOS, researchers found five of the most popular ChatGPT apps hiding third-party trackers on fingerprint-operated devices — over 300 server requests were made in only 4 minutes by a single app! –, seven violating Apple’s data collection rules, and eight charging access to ChatGPT for sums of up to $15,000 per year! Apparently, the bigger it is, the better it goes. Here are the offending apps:

ChatGPT application: beware of clone scams

This is not the first time such events have occurred. In effect, MacRumors had spotted at the beginning of January a fake application posted on the App Store called ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3 – a name that should however put the flea in the ear –, which purely and simply scams unsuspecting users.

To do this, the publisher Social Media Apps & Game Sports health Hiking Running fitness tracking – such a name is already suspicious – plays on the ambiguity by writing in the description (in English): “AI Chat based on GPT-3 ChatGPT”. And therein lies the subtlety. This is all the more misleading as it uses the official OpenAI logo with a slight variation. In addition, the application has no less than 12,800 reviews with an average of 4.6/5, which gives the victim confidence. A good score which is explained by the fact that users also note the results obtained on the Web version – and which are truly stunning – believing that they are dealing with the real ChatGPT here. And obviously, many are those who have been fooled, because it is one of the most downloaded applications from the American App Store, in the “Productivity” category. In France, it is among the most popular applications in this section – which, by the way, the “developers” boast about in the history of the application.

ChatGPT: fake apps to make money

In its free version, ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3 works via advertisements and offers only a limited number of requests before switching to a subscription page. And as much to say that the prices are quite mind-blowing! Indeed, the weekly subscription is at the high price of 10 €the monthly at 23 € and the annual of 60 €. Of course, such a fee schedule is intended to push users towards an annual subscription, in order to earn as much money as possible before they realize the deception. Because, obviously, we are far from the results obtained with the real ChatGPT. Here, the answers are short and sometimes totally off topic – not to mention that the AI ​​regularly stops in the middle of a word, without providing the rest of the text.

Worryingly, the app has, like the others, already gone through Apple’s review process several times to get on the App Store. At no time has its usurpation, its subscriptions or its uselessness posed a problem for Apple – yet renowned for its intransigence – which seriously raises the question of the validation of applications at Apple. Especially since this is not an isolated case! There are many other applications that use the same type of scams, whether in the App Store or the Play Store – but that’s already less surprising. We found in this last ChatGPT Chatteo AI Chat, with 100,000 downloads and which works via the purchase of credits, ChatGPT from MediaVents Hindricks, with 100,000 downloads and a functioning “thanks” to advertisements, or ChatGPT: Chat with AI Chatbot, 100,000 downloads too and lots of ads. And of course, all of them are far from being efficient… One more example that it is not because you download via an official store that there is no danger!