‘OpenAI’ Job Scam Targeted International Workers Through Telegram

“Regrettably, I found no available source online to know more about this organization except for those registrations,” wrote the complainant. “They are collecting huge amounts of investment from third world countries in Asia.”

One of the FTC complaints alleges that over 6,000 people in Bangladesh were potentially impacted by the OpenAi-etc job scam. The ages listed in the FTC complaints range from teenagers to people in their fifties, with locations spread across multiple Bangladesh cities, from Dhaka to Khulna.

“My next trading date was 29 August, 2024,” wrote another complainant. “I made the trade with my whole amount in the evening. But, suddenly, the OpenAI company vanished. I didn’t withdraw any money but lost both capital and profit. Now, I am in a great economic crisis, as I am a normal school teacher.”

Niko Felix, a spokesperson for OpenAI, declined to answer questions about whether the startup was previously aware of the “OpenAi-etc” scam, or if they planned to take action against the fraudsters. But he did share that OpenAI is investigating the matter. The alleged scam website is no longer available online, and WIRED was not able to contact the people behind "OpenAi-etc" prior to publication.

A Telegram spokesperson using the name Remi Vaughn tells WIRED that the company monitors its platform for scams, such as those allegedly carried out by OpenAi-etc, which used the messaging app to communicate with people who believed they were working for the company.

"Telegram actively moderates harmful content on its platform, including scams," Vaughn says in a statement sent to WIRED through the messaging platform. "Moderators empowered with custom Al and machine learning tools proactively monitor public parts of the platform and accept reports from users and organizations in order to remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day."

The usual pattern of a crypto job scam is to trick people into depositing some kind of digital currency into a fake account the victim believes they have control over, until the perpetrator drains it one day without warning. While this specific rug pull used OpenAI’s branding to allegedly dupe its victims, a crypto job scam can happen with the name of any company that has enough widespread recognition for criminals to capitalize on.

“These social engineering scams are designed to lower our natural suspicion and to make us complicit in our own deception,” says Arun Vishwanath, a cybersecurity expert and author of The Weakest Link. “For job scams, they try to turn our ambitions and inherent trust in brands into a vulnerability.” Similar to so-called pig butchering investment scams, a key component often includes direct messages over a long period of time to cultivate a sense of trust with the targets.

Although comparable job scams happen all over the world, Vishwanath believes that Asian cultural norms of so-called high power distance, where there’s more acceptance of interpersonal hierarchies, are a contributing factor. "Authorities are expected to ask you things and make you do things," he says. "And you just comply." Scammers are taking advantage of this by imitating authority figures and leaning into the sense of urgency inherent to searching for a job.

Bangladeshi citizens on the difficult hunt for reliable work have increasingly been targeted by job scammers in recent years. Lies about international job opportunities have left throngs of would-be workers stranded in Malaysia, and at least three cases of kidney organ theft were reported by people lured to India with false promises of work.