Leaderboard / Case No. FB-2026-02-25-openai-false-witness-recovery-scam
A Cambodia-based scam network used ChatGPT to pose as fake law firms, real attorneys and the FBI's IC3, demanding upfront fees from people who had already been scammed to "recover" their money.
Score breakdown
| Component | Value | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Sentence-Years | 23 | 18 USC 1343, 18 USC 912 |
| × Contribution | 0.5 | Wrote the content: OpenAI says the scammers used ChatGPT to write fake law-firm content, cold outreach and replies to targets "in the style of a lawyer", and to create fake attorney registration records and a fake New York State Bar Association card; humans ran the scam. |
| × Blast Radius | 1 | Third party: The targets were members of the public who had already lost money to scams, plus real attorneys whose identities were used; OpenAI says messages drafted with ChatGPT told targets to send cryptocurrency fees. |
| × Legal status | 1 | Crime. |
| + Tradecraft | 0 | None of the rubric's intrusion techniques apply to an impersonation scam. |
| + Guardrails | 0 | Guardrails intact: OpenAI's report describes no jailbreak or safety bypass; the model was used as shipped. |
| + Dwell Time | 0 | OpenAI does not say when the operation began, so dwell is counted from the report date (0 days) and never inflated; OpenAI found and banned the accounts, though it notes the FBI had already issued public alerts about this kind of scam. |
| Total | 11.5 |
Charges the human could face
18 USC 1343Up to 20 years18 USC 912Up to 3 years