Elon Musk flags Indian memecoin AI bot as possible fraud, could this truly be a scam?

The official Twitter account of ‘ExplainThis Bob’, an AI-powered Twitter bot associated with the Indian who created the crypto token $BOB, was suspended right after Musk accused it of being a crypto scam. According to Musk, the bot account is presumed to be a fake cryptocurrency account.

‘BOB’ is in danger

On 18 June 2023, Musk tweeted in response to the bot that the account was fraudulent, and the account appears to have been suspended shortly after. Musk claimed that the ‘Explain This Bob’ bot was being used to pump and dump a cryptocurrency named ‘BOB’ which led to its suspension from Twitter.

Before being suspended, the Explain This Bob account reportedly had over 400,000 followers. The bot has been developed by Indian developer Prabhu P. Biswal, who utilised OpenAI's GPT-4 model to understand and respond to tweets from users who tagged the account.

Additionally, the initiative was connected to the April-launched ERC-20 memecoin Bob Token (BOB). The suspension of ‘Explain this Bob’ caused a more than 30 percent decrease in the price of BOB.

Musk was ‘impressed’ by Bob

Previously, Elon Musk, the tech tycoon, was impressed by Bob's response that it could explain any tweet and respond with the words ‘I love Bob’. And right after Musk’s response, the token price saw a bull run, leading to a 1000 percent price gain and a tenfold surge in trading volume in only two weeks.

‘FREEBOB’ on trend

However, Twitter has not taken any legal action against the Bob token account. The team behind the project hilariously reacted to the news of the suspension by posting a meme showing Musk watching a distressed ‘Bob’ in jail.

The hashtag ‘FREEBOB’ has been trending on crypto twitter since the ban. The majority of observers believe that BOB is not a scam currency and that the suspension is unjustified since the token's launch was fair and because BOB was fully decentralised and has a 0 percent tax system.

However, others claim that the team didn't give themselves any tokens or airdrops before the introduction of the Bob token in April.

In May of last year, 2022, numerous investors put money into the meme craze as a result of how quickly popular memes like PEPE, BOB, and others have risen in popularity.

Yet, memecoin is an investment and speculation with significant risks, so it has to be carefully researched and funded. This is due to the fact that a large number of memecoin fraudsters appear to defraud individuals of their money whenever the value of memecoins reaches a high or low point.