DeepSeek Warns Of Scam Websites, Social Media Accounts

Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek has warned that fake social media accounts and websites are taking advantage of the company’s sudden popularity to propagate scams.

The Hangzhou-based company said it has only three authentic social media accounts, hosted on Chinese platforms WeChat and RedNote as well as X, formerly Twitter.

The company said its smartphone app is free to download and that social media accounts set up to charge fees are fraudulent.

It added that it has not issued cryptocurrencies, after security researchers found fraudulent websites promoting scam crypto tokens.

Fake accounts

The post was DeepSeek’s first official announcement site it skyrocketed to popularity late last month, in a development that rattled investors and wiped $1 trillion (£810bn) from world markets in a single day.

The low-profile start-up attracted worldwide attention for its V3 large language model (LLM) and R1 reasoning model, which it claims achieve high performance rankings despite having been trained at a fraction of the price of competitors.

In a previous post on X, the company also warned that an account on the platform was a “typical impersonation account” pretending to belong to the company’s founder Liang Wenfeng.

Chinese security research firm XLab said late last week that more than 2,600 fake DeepSeek websites had been created from 1 December, 2024 to 3 February, 2025, mostly for phishing, domain squatting or traffic redirection.

Some of the scam sites also involved selling fake crypto tokens designed to swindle buyers, while others claimed to be selling pre-initial public offering shares in DeepSeek, XLab said.

Crypto scams

Cyber-security firm Cyble said it had found fake DeepSeek websites that try to trick users into connecting their cryptocurrency wallets, allowing the hackers to steal funds.

The scam involves tricking the user into scanning QR codes, Cyble said.

Other fake websites try to collect users’ personal information or offer downloads for DeepSeek apps that could contain malware, the firm said.