TL;DR

• Scammers are targeting TRUMP and MELANIA investors with fake websites, tricking them into linking their wallets to dubious resources.
• With TRUMP’s price down from its peak and multiple crypto experts bashing the asset’s launch, further big rallies may be limited, so careful research is essential before investing.

Investors, Beware

This bull cycle will be remembered for the solid performance of the meme coin niche. Just a few days ago, the Trump family jumped on the bandwagon, making huge waves in the entire crypto space.

On January 18, Donald Trump’s meme coin, Official Trump (TRUMP), saw the light of day, and shortly after, its price skyrocketed to spectacular levels. It briefly surpassed $70, with its market capitalization soaring past $14.5 billion. 

Trump’s wife also launched a meme coin called Melania Meme (MELANIA), and at one point, its market cap soared above $2 billion.

Despite retracing substantially from their peak levels in the past several days, both tokens remain quite trending. This could explain why scammers have supposedly created numerous websites offering dubious services with TRUMP and MELANIA, with the sole purpose of conning unsuspecting victims.

According to a recent report, people visiting such malicious addresses are offered to connect their wallets to the resource to check their right to participate in transactions with the new tokens. 

“The official address of the token is indicated on all websites, but when connecting, the victim is asked for the seed phrase from the wallet. Fraudsters can also “hijack” a crypto wallet or connect malware to withdraw funds,” said Maria Sinitsyna, a senior analyst working for a Russian cybersecurity company called F.A.C.C.T. 

Is It too Late to Deal With TRUMP?

The impressive price increase of Donald Trump’s meme coin allowed savvy traders to make huge profits overnight due to entering and eventually exiting the ecosystem at the right time.

Currently, TRUMP’s valuation stands far from the peak level registered on January 19, suggesting that the hype could have gradually decreased. In addition, many leading cryptocurrency exchanges (including Binance, Coinbase, Bybit, and more) allowed trading services with the asset. 

Separately, many industry insiders were against the TRUMP token launch, indicating that such zero-value assets only harm the industry instead of legitimizing it.

Investors who are still contemplating joining the ecosystem should consider the risks involved and the enhanced volatility of that type of asset. Upon making a final decision, they must conduct proper due diligence and distribute only as much as they are ready to lose. 

Circle, the issuer of the $48 billion USDC stablecoin, introduced Paymaster, a product allowing users to pay for transaction fees on Arbitrum and Base using the second-biggest stablecoin instead of ether (ETH), the second-biggest cryptocurrency.

Blockchain transactions require users to pay transaction fees that are used to compensate validators for processing and securing these transactions. Different blockchains often use different tokens, forcing users to manage an assortment of tokens across the various chains.

Paymaster accepts USDC and then handles the native token payments to the blockchain validators, the company said in a blog post.

The service, which is set to expand to Ethereum, Polygon POS, and Solana, charges users 10% of the gas cost for each transaction. The fee is being waived until June 30 to encourage adoption.

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“This is the most humble day of my life,” Rupert Murdoch declared to MPs in 2011 as the full horrors of his newspapers’ phone-hacking emerged. Happily for the media tycoon, his days of sackcloth did not last. 

On Monday he took his seat as one of the select guests at Donald Trump’s inauguration. In the summer, as the UK election neared, both Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak rushed to pay homage at his summer party. The years between would not normally be considered rehabilitative. Murdoch had to pay well in excess of $1bn in costs and damages to victims of his news organisations’ criminality, industrial intrusion or malpractice on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Wednesday saw the last-minute settlement of the outstanding phone-hacking lawsuit against his company in Britain, a case involving one victim with the wherewithal and status to insist on his day in court. Prince Harry took it to the very brink but he too has settled, purportedly for huge damages, an unprecedented apology and admission of historic unlawful activity by private investigators working for The Sun — though not an acceptance of culpability by senior executives.

Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of News UK, has used its financial might to keep at least 1,300 cases out of court, sparing itself damaging revelations or questions. The UK’s civil courts exist to deliver redress not uncover information. The rules incentivise a settlement by loading potential costs on to the victorious plaintiff if they go to trial and do not secure more than the settlement that was offered in advance. Those who wish to fight on face impossible risks. Last year the actor Hugh Grant reluctantly settled, saying that not doing so could leave him facing millions in legal expenses.

For the Duke of Sussex — and his co-plaintiff, the former Labour deputy leader Lord Tom Watson — it was not really about money. They hoped a trial would expose Murdoch executives to new revelations about the unlawful use of private investigators and the company’s efforts to contain the scandal. That possibility is now denied. The duke claimed a “monumental victory” but the NGN strategy has worked. A lot of money has been spent keeping these cases from trial. In the end even he could not defy the financial risks.

Speaking after the settlement Prince Harry’s barrister, David Sherborne, stated that NGN had “deleted over 30mn emails and made false denials”. They had incurred “more than £1bn in payouts and costs”. Sherborne added that claimants had been “strong-armed into settling without being able to get to the truth”. NGN’s lawyers strongly dispute suggestions of a cover-up and have always said the deletions were part of a wider housekeeping process. 

The same modus operandi of paying to avoid the daylight of a court case applied in the US. In 2023, Fox News paid $787mn to settle a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over the channel’s perpetuation of false claims it was involved in electoral fraud in the 2020 election. Central to the libel were fears within Fox that failing to endorse Trump’s fraud claims would see viewers leave for more conservative channels. After the deal, Fox hilariously declared: “This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” 

That Murdoch is still welcome in Trump’s circles is unsurprising. But he is also still courted in the UK. The Tories shelved a promised part two of the public inquiry into media malpractice and opposed state regulation of the press. Starmer has followed that line and courted Murdoch while in opposition. The Sun backed Starmer at the election — though probably because his victory looked inevitable.

Murdoch has since passed formal leadership of his businesses to his eldest son Lachlan and sold his stake in Sky TV. Rebekah Brooks, acquitted of phone hacking but a former Sun and News of the World editor — and chief executive of the company when the scandal broke — is now CEO of the UK parent company, News UK.

There are many who despise Murdoch for his politics and his influence, though few can dispute his brilliance as both a business and newspaper man. But what matters here is that settlements have muffled awkward questions about the company’s actions. Nick Davies, the reporter who broke the scandal, has painstakingly detailed issues that arise from the memos, minutes, emails and documents released into court ahead of now-settled cases, while stressing they are only one side of a story.

Murdoch’s businesses have spent a fortune to avoid further public scrutiny. Their bet is that the maximum danger has passed and this latest furore will abate. Now the only hope for full transparency is for the police to reopen the issues of accountability at the top of the company raised in the new documents and by Sherborne and others, including former prime minister Gordon Brown. The police did not distinguish themselves in the original inquiries and there are questions to resolve. Only if a new investigation is secured can it really be called a victory.

Otherwise there can be only one conclusion. Like the Buchanans of The Great Gatsby, Murdoch’s businesses have been able to wreck lives and retreat into their money. He and his execs remain unbowed; feted and fawned upon. The warrior prince won more than most but, ultimately, even he could not pay the full price of justice.

robert.shrimsley@ft.com

What do AI voice agents and self-driving cars have in common? Their performance can be evaluated in the same way, argues Brooke Hopkins, a former tech lead at Waymo. Coval, Hopkins’ new startup, looks to do just that.

“When I left Waymo, I realized a lot of these problems that we had at Waymo were exactly what the rest of the AI industry was facing,” Hopkins (pictured above in the center) told TechCrunch. “But everyone was saying that this is a new paradigm, we’re having to come up with testing practices from first principles and that basically we all have to recreate everything. And I looked at that and said, wait, we’ve spent the last 10 years in self driving figuring out how to do this.”

In 2024, she decided to launch Coval, a platform that builds simulations for AI voice and chat agents that tests and evaluates how they perform tasks in the same way Hopkins tested self-driving cars at Waymo. Coval can run thousands of simulations simultaneously, like having the agent make a restaurant reservation or having the agent respond to a customer service question asked in an indirect way.

Coval’s tech evaluates the agents on a general set of metrics, but companies can also customize what they are looking for and use Coval to continue to evaluate for regressions. Users can also take this data, and the insights they gleam off of it, and bring it to their end-customers either for a demo or as a monitoring tool to show their customers the agent is working as intended.

“One of the biggest blockers to agents being adopted by enterprises is them feeling confident that this isn’t just a demo with smoke and mirrors,” Hopkins said. “Choosing between vendors is a really complicated task for these executives because it’s just very hard to know what you even ask or how do you even prove that these agents are doing what you expect. And so this gives our companies the ability to really show that and demonstrate it.”

Hopkins really formulated the idea behind Coval during the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch before launching the product publicly in October 2024. She said that demand has been strong and has become explosive in the last two months, with customers asking how quickly they can get their agents evaluated.

The San Francisco-based startup is now announcing a $3.3 million seed round led by MaC Venture Capital with participation from Y Combinator and General Catalyst. The startup will use the capital to build out its engineering team and work to achieve product-market fit. Hopkins added that the company will also be working toward enabling its users to evaluate other types of AI agents, like web-based agents, in the future.

Coval comes on the scene while both momentum — and hype — around AI agents appears to be at an all-time high. Enterprise tech leaders like Marc Benioff have been praising (and marketing) the technology by saying Salesforce will deploy more than a billion of its AI agents by next year. OpenAI is rumored to be releasing its take on an AI agent very soon.

There are also numerous startups building in the space, too. There were more than 100 startups building AI agents across Y Combinator’s three 2024 cohorts alone. Some AI agent startups have landed sizable venture funding rounds too. One, /dev/agents, raised a $55 million seed round at a $500 million valuation in November 2024, less than a year after it was founded.

This momentum means it’s likely that there will be more companies looking for help to evaluate their agents too. Hopkins said Coval has a good shot at standing out from the pack because, unlike the inevitable new entrants, Coval has a head start.

“I think where we really stand out is I’ve been working in this space for half a decade and I’ve built these systems over and over,” she said. “We’ve built multiple iterations and we’ve seen how they fail and how they scale and we’re building the same concepts into Coval and all of those learnings.”

Security researchers have discovered a new malicious chatbot advertised on cybercrime forums. GhostGPT generates malware, business email compromise scams, and more material for illegal activities.

The chatbot likely uses a wrapper to connect to a jailbroken version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or another large language model, the Abnormal Security experts suspect. Jailbroken chatbots have been instructed to ignore their safeguards to prove more useful to criminals.

What is GhostGPT?

The security researchers found an advert for GhostGPT on a cyber forum, and the image of a hooded figure as its background is not the only clue that it is intended for nefarious purposes. The bot offers fast processing speeds, useful for time-pressured attack campaigns. For example, ransomware attackers must act quickly once within a target system before defenses are strengthened.

It also says that user activity is not logged on GhostGPT and can be bought through the encrypted messenger app Telegram, likely to appeal to criminals who are concerned about privacy. The chatbot can be used within Telegram, so no suspicious software needs to be downloaded onto the user’s device.

Its accessibility through Telegram saves time, too. The hacker does not need to craft a convoluted jailbreak prompt or set up an open-source model. Instead, they just pay for access and can get going.

“GhostGPT is basically marketed for a range of malicious activities, including coding, malware creation, and exploit development,” the Abnormal Security researchers said in their report. “It can also be used to write convincing emails for BEC scams, making it a convenient tool for committing cybercrime.”

It does mention “cybersecurity” as a potential use on the advert, but, given the language alluding to its effectiveness for criminal activities, the researchers say this is likely a “weak attempt to dodge legal accountability.”

To test its capabilities, the researchers gave it the prompt “Write a phishing email from Docusign,” and it responded with a convincing template, including a space for a “Fake Support Number.”

The ad has racked up thousands of views, indicating both that GhostGPT is proving useful and that there is growing interest amongst cyber criminals in jailbroken LLMs. Despite this, research has shown that phishing emails written by humans have a 3% better click rate than those written by AI, and are also reported as suspicious at a lower rate.

However, AI-generated material can also be created and distributed more quickly and can be done by almost anyone with a credit card, regardless of technical knowledge. It can also be used for more than just phishing attacks; researchers have found that GPT-4 can autonomously exploit 87% of “one-day” vulnerabilities when provided with the necessary tools.

Jailbroken GPTs have been emerging and actively used for nearly two years

Private GPT models for nefarious use have been emerging for some time. In April 2024, a report from security firm Radware named them as one of the biggest impacts of AI on the cybersecurity landscape that year.

Creators of such private GPTs tend to offer access for a monthly fee of hundreds to thousands of dollars, making them good business. However, it’s also not insurmountably difficult to jailbreak existing models, with research showing that 20% of such attacks are successful. On average, adversaries need just 42 seconds and five interactions to break through.

SEE: AI-Assisted Attacks Top Cyber Threat, Gartner Finds

Other examples of such models include WormGPT, WolfGPT, EscapeGPT, FraudGPT, DarkBard, and Dark Gemini. In August 2023, Rakesh Krishnan, a senior threat analyst at Netenrich, told Wired that FraudGPT only appeared to have a few subscribers and that “all these projects are in their infancy.” However, in January, a panel at the World Economic Forum, including Secretary General of INTERPOL Jürgen Stock, discussed FraudGPT specifically, highlighting its continued relevance.

There is evidence that criminals are already using AI for their cyber attacks. The number of business email compromise attacks detected by security firm Vipre in the second quarter of 2024 was 20% higher than the same period in 2023 — and two-fifths of them were generated by AI. In June, HP intercepted an email campaign spreading malware in the wild with a script that “was highly likely to have been written with the help of GenAI.”

Pascal Geenens, Radware’s director of threat intelligence, told TechRepublic in an email: “The next advancement in this area, in my opinion, will be the implementation of frameworks for agentific AI services. In the near future, look for fully automated AI agent swarms that can accomplish even more complex tasks.”

What Is A Crypto Payment Gateway?

A **cryptocurrency payment gateway** helps **process payments** made in **digital currencies** through **blockchain networks**. These systems use a **decentralized method** to keep transactions **secure** and **user information private**.

What Is Crypto Payments Processing?

Crypto payment processing allows users to make and receive payments in digital currencies over secure, reliable, and efficient blockchain networks with minimal chances of fraudulent activities.

Users can make cryptocurrency payments and receive fiat currencies in exchange for increasing payment options for users without any delays, such as time-consuming verification procedures, users are exposed to in the traditional payment processing systems.

How Do Cryptocurrency Payment Gateways Work?

Ever wondered how a crypto payment gateway works? These gateways act as a bridge between vendors and consumers, enabling easy digital currency transactions for which users immediately receive fiat currency. These gateways facilitate the process of making and accepting crypto payments directly between the payer and the receiver. Here we have a detailed article on how crypto fiat payment gateways work; make sure to check it out.

Consumers can scan QR codes or send and receive funds directly to their designated wallet addresses or merchant accounts. The blockchain platforms keep a record of all transactions to make sure they are legitimate and unique. That way, no transactions are repeated, and the users are prevented from overspending.

What You Should Consider When Choosing A Crypto Payment Processor?

Choosing the best digital currency payment gateway requires the business to understand its needs and look for factors that would add value to its offerings and make it stand out differently from the mainstream market.

Security

The primary factor to consider when looking for good crypto payment gateways is the security of transactions. The top crypto gateways ensure the secure and confidential processing of funds without any third-party involvement to guarantee the privacy of their customers.

Moreover, it would be a great idea to choose a platform that offers advanced security features such as two-factor authentication, offline wallets, and encryption keys to ensure the integrity of their users.

Transaction Fees

One of the essential factors to look for in a crypto payment gateway is the transaction cost. There should be no hidden charges that might come as a surprise during the payment processing, such as in credit card payments.

In addition, the transaction fees should be minimal to ensure easy processing to cater to the business needs of small and medium enterprises. It would be a great idea to compare different crypto payment gateways to identify the most value-for-money option according to individual needs.

Website Integration

The website of a crypto payment gateway is an integral part of one of the major touch points for its customers. The user-friendliness and speed of the website of a crypto payment gateway are extremely important to ensure efficiency in the processing of funds.

Moreover, the best crypto payment gateways have responsive websites and offer effective merchant integration with complete guidance for corporate and individual customers.

Customer Support

An efficient crypto gateway offers good customer support and caters to the needs of its target audience effectively to ensure smooth payment processing. It should have a responsive customer support service to answer the queries of its clients in a timely manner.

The top cryptocurrency payment service providers offer 24/7 customer support, which ensures assistance at any given moment.

Functionalities

You need to check the features of your shortlisted cryptocurrency payment gateway to make a decision that supports your business needs effectively. Some common features include multi-currency support, a digital wallet, accepting major cryptocurrencies, reasonable fees, and currency swap options.

Device Compatibility

The top crypto gateways provide compatibility with a wide range of devices to help users process payments while on the go. This helps in efficient payment processing for a large majority of the consumer market, especially those who do not have access to high-end electronic devices.

Therefore, it is important that you look for a digital payment gateway that offers easy compatibility with multiple devices and operating systems to ensure quick payment processing.