The sudden rise of DeepSeek, a cheap and efficient Chinese AI model, isn’t just depressing the stock market and Bitcoin’s price—it has also prompted the creation of dozens of phony meme coins and imposter sites looking to swindle crypto users.
In the last day alone, over 75 coins claiming to be official DeepSeek tokens have proliferated— primarily on Ethereum and Solana—according to Blockaid, a crypto security startup.
DeepSeek has not issued a token, nor does the company have any relationship to crypto whatsoever. But the recent popularity of tokens tied to AI-related projects has likely encouraged scammers to assume that traders eager to get in on the DeepSeek hype will make the connection between AI and crypto… and not ask further questions.
“It’s not hard to imagine how a trader who’s not following closely might be led to think that this is a real thing,” Oz Tamir, a security researcher at Blockaid, told Decrypt.
Further adding fuel to the fire, per Tamir, was President Donald Trump’s launch of his own meme coin earlier this month. The remarkable act of a sitting U.S. president creating their own crypto token—which received decidedly mixed reviews from the industry—has done much to lend credibility to fictional claims of major companies and individuals launching similar projects, the researcher said.
“It can help scammers get away with schemes that would’ve been easy to spot in previous cycles,” he explained.
Some DeepSeek imposters have gone to remarkable lengths to fool unsuspecting victims. One such site, which appears to be a full working replica of the real DeepSeek app, prompts users to connect their crypto wallets. Doing so would allow the site’s creators to immediately drain the wallet of all funds.
With crypto at the height of a resurgent bull run, and major public figures like Trump lifting risk-prone corners of the industry—like the meme coin market—to unprecedented levels of exposure, a perfect storm may now be substantially increasing the already significant risk of crypto-related scams and phishing attacks.
But many likely victims of such scams may also be fairly unfamiliar with navigating the complex world of decentralized finance—which could actually be a good thing. Though most meme coins are issued on public blockchains and cannot be banned or deleted, they are commonly discovered and researched on platforms like Uniswap and DexScreener. Both companies have teamed with Blockaid to ensure that search results for users do not include scam tokens.
But new imposter tokens pop up constantly, and rooting them out can often become a game of whack-a-mole. While no DeepSeek tokens can currently be found on DexScreener, one did appear in a search on Uniswap. Numerous DeepSeek tokens are listed on Pump.fun, the popular launchpad for new Solana meme coins.
Even if token listing platforms perfect the process of rooting out scam tokens, however, that solution may only create additional tensions. Many in the fiercely independent crypto world consider decentralization to be a holy principle that should never be infringed upon, even at the risk of permitting criminality.
As crypto rises further into the cultural and economic mainstream, the risk of scams targeting uneducated traders will only grow—as will, perhaps, the need for censoring said scams. Whether decentralized finance’s core userbase will be on board for those shifts is an open question.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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