A team of researchers at San Diego State University developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system, dubbed GiveawayScamHunter, to hunt down and expose free cryptocurrency giveaway scams on X (previously known as Twitter)—and the results are both alarming and fascinating.

According to Cointelegraph, from June 2022 to June 2023, the AI-driven tool was up against an astounding 95,111 scam lists created by 87,617 accounts on the X social network, and the consequences of their actions amounted to nearly $1 million lost by victims to these scams.

The team used another powerful tool in this battle—a natural-language-processing (NLP) tool—to find and expose these fraudulent crypto dealings. The team had trained this NLP tool on data from previously identified giveaway scams, allowing them to identify nearly 100,000 instances of scam giveaway lists in just a year's time, as an article on Ticker News stated.

Throughout their investigation, the researchers autonomously extracted relevant website and wallet addresses associated with the scams, gathering a treasure trove of crucial data. This allowed them to uncover 327 scam giveaway domains and 121 new scam-related cryptocurrency wallet addresses, further expanding the knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms behind these illicit activities.

As Ticker News reports, the AI system not only provided a wealth of information on unreported scam websites and wallets, but also offered valuable insights into how these scams unfold, who the scammers are targeting, and an estimate of the number of victims that have been duped by these deceptive practices. In fact, the study unearthed that during the one-year period, over 365 individuals fell victim to these crypto scams, suffering losses surpassing a staggering $872,000.

Following the momentous discovery, the San Diego State University researchers dutifully reported their findings—including all relevant accounts, domains, and wallet addresses—to both X and the cryptocurrency/blockchain community in the hope of curbing these malignant practices.

Nevertheless, all was not smooth sailing, as the scientists soon realized that 43.9% of the associated accounts still remained active as of the publication of their paper on August 10, 2023.