How to avoid scammers on Telegram
Telegram communities have been a long-standing feature of most cryptocurrency projects, due to Telegram’s reach and ease of use for mobile phone users. Unfortunately it has also been a hotbed of scammers looking to prey on crypto newbies for nearly as long.
In nearly any Telegram group related to crypto, asking a simple question about making a transaction with a wallet will cause the questioner to be immediately bombarded by DMs from scammers pretending to be server administrators, looking to “help” the user solve their problem — in actuality though, helping themselves to the user’s holdings by employing a number of social-engineering tactics to trick the user into divulging their private key/seed phrase to the fraudster or entering it into a website under the fraudster’s control.
Almost any legitimate crypto Telegram group will have constant messages from admins or channel bots warning users that admins will never DM them first. Really that message should be changed to “Any DM you get on Telegram in response to a crypto question is a scam 100% of the time.”
But this warning alone isn’t sufficient, because even if users pay attention to it and disregard unsolicited DMs, scammers are already one step ahead — some have resorted to creating entire fake Telegram groups, and it can be very hard for the average or even experienced Telegram user to spot the difference between a fake group and the official group of a crypto project.
For instance, the official Neo Telegram group has a lookalike group created by a fraudster, and it’s quite hard to determine which group is real and which one is fake without very careful inspection:
Telegram’s design contributes to the confusion that the scammers use to convince users they are in the official Telegram group for the project. Unlike Discord, Telegram has a built-in search feature to find a group to join by keywords, so anyone can create a fake group, use the official project’s logo, pay for a bunch of Telegram bots to join the channel and make it look legitimate.
Additionally, unless users have their privacy settings locked down, the scammers can add users from the legitimate group to the fake group without their consent. And Telegram’s own staff is apparently unable to tell the difference between the real and fake group, because the fake Telegram group shown above has been reported to them many, many times.
To ensure you are in the official Telegram group of any crypto project, make sure you only join by following the link provided through official channels of the project. (For instance, if you go to neo.org, you can find a link to the official telegram group). If you do use the search feature of Telegram to find a group or you are already joined to a group, check the “info” link for the group in the app, then find the group URL under “share link” and verify that it matches the URL provided through the official channels. Always cross-verify any instructions or links provided in Telegram with official sources for safety.
