South Korea Ends $18 Million Crypto Ponzi Scheme With The Help Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Today’s crypto news features the police in South Korea has recently arrested suspects behind a new crypto ponzi scheme that uses artificial intelligence (AI), according to the English-language news outlet Korea Joonggang Daily reported on April 8.

The scheme stole a total of 21.2 billion won ($18.3 million) over a six-month period in 2018. However, it finally came to an end after the Seoul Special Judicial Police Bureau for Public Safety trained robots caught the ponzi scheme using keywords and other clues.

We are talking about actual artificial intelligence (AI) powered robots which were able to learn the patterns of Ponzi schemes. As the section chief of the bureau’s second investigation team named Hong Nam-ki told the publication:

“Through keywords such as Ponzi, loan and recruiting members, we were able to teach the AI patterns of Ponzi schemes. The program can also identify advertisement patterns and identified the enterprise in question, which [was caught] with evidence provided by an unnamed informant.”

The CEOs of the scheme, known as Lee and Bae, amassed a lot of money through selling private digital tokens named M-Coin which posed to be a real altcoin, along with membership fees from recruits, as the publication states.

The figures also took advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge of the crypto space to part them from their fiat investments.

“In our stakeout, we saw that most people attending the swindler’s presentation for membership were elderly people in their 60s and 70s,” Hong Nam-ki added.

Currently, Ponzi schemes still remain a persistent phenomenon despite the increasing legitimacy of cryptocurrency in the public eye. This is obviously not the first (or the last) crypto ponzi scheme that exists out there – and will hopefully not be the last to be spotted with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

Earlier this year, authorities caught up with the controllers of OneCoin which is a notorious international quasi-pyramid scheme which ran for several years.