I have been seeing more and more reports circulating about an old scam that is making a comeback with a clever rebrand. The criminals are renaming their fraudulent mev bots by adding "ChatGPT" to the name, and it works surprisingly well. People fall into the trap because they think that if they use ChatGPT for coding, then it must be legitimate.

Here's how the scam works: they promise you an mev bot that monitors Ethereum for arbitrage opportunities and new tokens, with guaranteed profits. They ask you to create a MetaMask wallet, then click on a link that takes you to Remix (the developer platform). You copy the code, deploy the smart contract, and here’s where it gets interesting: they tell you to deposit ETH to "activate" it. The more you deposit, the more profits you'll see. But when you press start, everything disappears. The ETH goes directly into the scammer’s wallet through a backdoor in the code.

According to security reports, they have found at least three addresses using this technique. One has stolen 30 ETH (about $78,000) from over 100 victims. The other two have taken 20 ETH each (about $52,000) from 93 victims. The sneaky part is that they steal small amounts from many people, so most don’t bother trying to recover the funds because the effort cost outweighs the amount stolen.

What are the warning signs? Watch YouTube videos promoting these mev bots: they often have unsynchronized audio and video, or are recycled from other videos. Check the initial comments: if you only see praise and thanks, and then after a few weeks people start saying it’s a scam, well, that’s a pretty clear red flag. In short, if something seems too good to be true in crypto, it probably is.