I’m going on holidays for the next three weeks but I’ll bring you another Portugal Weekly in the middle of that break on August 25. I hope you all get the chance to take a bit of a break and enjoy the summer.
A young Portuguese man who started hacking at just 10 years old is set to stand trial for creating a malicious version of ChatGPT, Público reports. WormGPT was available on the deep web without any guardrails or ethical boundaries blocking users from carrying out illegal acts, such as generating a phishing email campaign. According to the newspaper, João (not his real name) didn’t see himself as a criminal and was motivated mostly by learning until other hackers started contacting him to create tools that would do more serious acts, like cloning credit cards. He decided to get rid of the program, sounding alarms at the FBI, which alerted the Criminal Investigation Police (PJ). They found a letter on his computer saying he’d sell it for €55,000.
Still living with his parents, he was arrested at the start of 2025 and released on bail with the condition he had no access to the internet, complicating his computer engineering studies, but the privilege was eventually restored. In court, the judge urged João, now 23, to use his brain for good and he’s been completely cooperative with the investigation. Admitting what he did led to the number of alleged crimes being reduced to three charges of computer sabotage. Authorities hope that he will help them identify the people that used the platform he built. Just in August 2023, 70 hackers from Australia, the US, South Africa, Singapore, Israel and other countries used WormGPT. A source linked to the investigation told Público João’s mum’s unemployment contributed to his decision to sell subscriptions to the program. It’s claimed he made €24,290.
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