Fake AI Coins: When Two Hype Cycles Collide

The intersection of two of the biggest hype categories in recent memory — artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency — has produced its own distinct scam category, and Felix Bick devotes Chapter 33 of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps to unpacking it directly.

Bick describes the pattern bluntly: a wave of tokens marketed as “AI coins” claim to power AI trading systems, AI content generation, or decentralized AI computing, often with no functioning product behind the branding at all. The AI label, he notes, is applied primarily because both categories separately attract retail speculative interest — combining them multiplies the marketing appeal without requiring any actual technology to back it up.

Importantly, Bick doesn’t dismiss the category wholesale. He acknowledges genuine AI-blockchain projects do exist, generally building decentralized compute marketplaces or data infrastructure, and their legitimacy can be evaluated the same way as any technology project: is there a working product, a public and technically credible team, and a use case that doesn’t depend entirely on speculative token price appreciation?

The chapter offers specific red flags for the fraudulent version: a website full of AI-generated marketing imagery and buzzwords without any technical documentation — a whitepaper with genuine architecture details, GitHub repositories with real commit history — and tokenomics that allocate a large share of supply to anonymous founders with no vesting schedule.

This chapter is particularly timely given how rapidly AI-branded crypto projects have proliferated. Bick’s framework gives readers a way to evaluate any specific “AI coin” on its actual technical merits rather than being swept up by the combined excitement of two hyped categories at once.

How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps handles this genuinely current, fast-evolving scam category with the same rigor Felix Bick applies throughout the rest of the book.