OpenAI is quietly waging its own brand of legal ethics enforcement — and the target isn’t lawyers or law firms, it’s ChatGPT accounts masquerading as them.
According to reporting by Legal Cheek, OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts tied to bogus law firms and fake “lawyers” running scam-recovery schemes, aka Operation False Witness.
The playbook is familiar: polished websites, convincing attorney bios, legal-sounding emails, promises to recover stolen funds — and then requests for upfront fees, often in crypto. The twist? AI helped generate the professional gloss, from firm profiles to client communications, making the operations look far more legitimate than your average internet scam. Here are some additional details:
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OpenAI says the network promoted at least six supposed law firms. In some instances, it claims the fraudsters went further, impersonating real lawyers and even law enforcement bodies. Accounts were used to translate messages, rewrite communications into “American English”, produce text “in the style of a lawyer” and even generate fake supporting documents.
The tech giant says it will continue to disrupt malicious uses of its models and ban accounts linked to scams and impersonation.
OpenAI removing the accounts is great, but the larger issue for the legal industry is obvious: when AI can effortlessly produce credible-sounding legal content, the barrier to running a fake firm drops dramatically.
Innovation is great. Fake lawyers powered by machine learning? Less so.
OpenAI bans ChatGPT accounts linked to fake law firms and lawyers [Legal Cheek]
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Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.