AI chatbot fraud: the ‘gift card’ subcription that may cost you dear

After subscribing to the Claude chatbot, mystery payments started to appear on one family’s credit card bill. They are not alone David Duggan* was so impressed with the ability of the Claude chatbot to answer medical questions and organise family life, that a $20-a-month (£15) subscription seemed like money well spent. But then his wife spotted two $200 payments on his credit card bill for gift cards to use the artificial intelligence tool. Duggan, who lives on the east coast of the US, had not bought them, and immediately realised something was wrong. “My wife asked me: ‘Hey, did you make these $200 purchases?’ It was $400 in total. And then there was a third one, but that needed a confirmation and did not go through,” he says. When he contacted Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI tools, his account was suspended, but the computer-generated responses to his questions did not shed any light on what had happened. He started searching online for other victims, and found that a number of Claude users had had similar experiences and detailed them on online forum Reddit. One person reported that 10 payments, each for £18, had been taken from his account. An