Fighting a losing battle against Scammers on Telegram

—

Read more at ramijames.com

—

We at Scatter use Telegram as our main point of contact with the wider community. There are thousands of users in our channel, and tens of thousands more in related groups. We provide support, answer questions about the ecosystem, and interact with our users. It’s great for that, but unfortunately we have a few people ruining it for everyone.

The core issue we are facing is that there are scammers impersonating trusted figures within the community. I know for a fact that Dan Larimer has stopped using Telegram because of this, relying instead on Twitter to interact with users. He is in a position where he doesn’t have to provide direct support, so for him he doesn’t need to worry about users having less direct access to him. Both Nathan and I have had non-stop impersonators for at least the past year.

The Problem

Telegram does not provide adequate tools for verification of identity, nor do the have any adequate support mechanism for reporting fake accounts. You can always block an account, but if the scammer is sly they can create an account with an alternate ascii code for a letter that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The only way to report an account is to send a message to abuse@telegram.org (how 1999), or you can contact the @notoscam account that belongs to Telegram, but you shouldn’t expect much. I reached out to them and only got a response a week later. The scammer was long gone by then.

Fucking useless is what it is.

Telegram isn’t taking this seriously because they don’t seem to see the problem or do not see it as an issue. Afterall, Telegram is just supposed to be a chat program, and it has perhaps outgrown its use-case.

Proposed Solutions

I think that we can tackle this in a few ways.

1. Telegram should add a way to report accounts that are fraudulent.
2. In the cases where users were scammed out of private keys, accounts, and potentially tens of thousands of dollars, there needs to be a way to get law enforcement involved. This likely means IP tracking, which many users will oppose.
3. There needs to be some sort of verification system for users to prove who they are. Many other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter already provide similar tools for similar reasons.
4. RIDL integration into Telegram via a bot may help create a database of trusted users and known scammers. Users can be incentivized to use the bot through earning of RIDL tokens which can be used within the system to improve the network’s robustness.

In the meantime, stay vigilent. Never give out personal information on Telegram. Never share your private keys for any reason.

Stay safe.

You can always help support us by voting for our BP candidate “vote4scatter” on the EOS Mainnet and on the Telos Mainnet.

Click here to vote.

— Rami James | Telegram: https://t.me/Scatter | Website: https://get-scatter.com

Scatter is a blockchain application signature provider. We provide high quality tools for developers and users.