Bitcoin Forum

Disclaimer : This information is based on my opinion and experience, you can add and correct my mistakes for the benefit of everyone
Motivated by  dasunlanka (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5037588.0)

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INTRODUCTION

Global adoption, recognition and acceptance of cryptocurrency will be the best thing investors, traders and bounty hunters in crypto community will be happy about. However, the linear relationship between cryptocurrency trend and scam strategies can not be separated. This activities are widely carried out on social platforms and most commonly one is Telegram.
Telegram is an open source message app where projects raised community members for easy interaction and update everyone, these range from normal projects of many coin on markets cap and crypto exchanges.
With this App, You can interact and send message to a non contact member that's why it's easier for scammers to penetrate and prey on some innocent and naive members.

Common Telegram scam
After many encounter and research, I have come to realize that as crypto trends changes, so as scammers changes their tactics on how to hunt your money  and coin. The commonly ones are:

• Telegram exchange support
• Daily Investors and advisers
• Telegram Bot
• Trading Signals
• Escrow scam
• Api scam

Telegram exchange support: You will always come across this set of people in every telegram exchange group, they are always impersonating the admin.
They often used the same name as the admins of the group by changing their names and similar usernames.
Be careful, there is no any exchange support on telegram, admins can only help by forwarding your ticket only which you must have created on the exchange. Don't give out your login details such as emails, username and password outside the exchange, they will rip you off, of your hard earned fund.No admin will ever pm you on telegram, block them instantly the moment anyone come to your pm.

Daily Investors and company advisers: you will always find these annoying set of scammers in every telegram groups, they will come to your pm, telling you to invest in some shady business, there isn't nothing like easy business or profits. This is where you find cloud mining scammers, dont fall for this cheap scam as most cloud mining always results to exit scam. You can do more research on how innocent investors ended up with loss on cloud mining.
Telegram bot: This is another form of telegram scam that has been going for years, it's always a waste of energy referring your friends and foe to a bot that promise to pay you Ether and Btc. When you finally reach the point for withdrawal, they will request you to make deposit small amount of Ether or Satoshi before you can make complete withdrawal of your referral. Don't fall for this, I know it's a small Satoshi but imagine thousands of people fall for this, that's cool money for one cone head bastard scammer. There isn't free money even in free town.
Source List of telegram scam bots (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5243674.0)



Trading Signals Group: This one is general, you will come across them on bitcointalk, how they offer free signals, when to buy and sell and also provide some premium service for VIP members. They often show off their profits and PNL and how easy it's for them to make fortune on trading. Avoid them as plague, no trader is 100% accurate, you can learn some trading skills on YouTube for free and Udemy for just a token and help yourself on trading.

Escrow groups: we sometimes found our self with some coins and tokens that require KYC on some exchanges before one can trade them, while identity verification is very tough on some exchanges, this coin can be sold to anyone but you must avoid some third party groups.
Check service and lending board, you can easily locate good and reputable escrow on bitcointalk, their Trust and merit speaks for them.

Api scam: Avoid unrecognized Api services that aren't recommended by your exchange, if you must use Api on third party App, contact your exchange support if their services are legit and secure.

Telegram is safe but it is a haven for scammers, telegram should be treated that way, else, you will be scammed.
The first time I have a telegram account, someone messaged me if I know about metaforex, he said 24 hours profit. I knew it was a scam already, I traced the person, and found he is one of the member in a group I joined. Which means even if a group is legit, some of the members in the group can be scammers. No group is trustworthy.

But I still wonder, how can someone use strangers for escrow services? This is a bit of foolishness. Aside bitcointalk reputed members, and people you know and trusted, there is no proper escrow service imo. Someone can be scammed.

In addtion are Airdrop scams
There are some telegram channels that provide latest airdrop offers, some of the airdrops can be legit, but some can contain malware if you visit the airdrop official site, some will require someone to pay vip fee before they can be able to access the free coin. I have experienced one before, that I should pay vip fee, I did not because it is better not to gain anything than to lose my bitcoin or ether.

Additional is also some HYIP bot there or cloud mining, etc. as long as they said some passive things, or Bitcoin doubler or any cryptocurrencies. There are lof of them in Telegram, especially before when bull run 2017 - 2018 and still now, as I saw in the first post, it's kinda belongs in Telegram Bot.
Also what I experienced before is someone will contact you in Telegram, a stranger or random telegram account with some good pictures and description, and they offer something business or any investment about cryptocurrency.

I once saw a thread on this forum where a newbie user conducted transaction without an escrow with a newbie account on telegram, perhaps he wasn't informed.

This excape my mind, thanks for your contribution.

For me I hate when suddenly I get added to a group without my knowledge for a scam ICO or IEO. The others that I have encountered are the one with fake GIVEAWAYS. Most of them have a great transcript created by multiple bots and when you try to ask them questions your comments will get deleted automatically.

Beware of GIVEAWAY scam!! they are everywhere.

I've encountered such things during the peak of quarantine. Maybe because out of boredom or lack of money. It was a bot where I only have to send a referral link to others and ask them to join as well. Every active referrals has an equivalent amount of btc. They even have a group chat for members and are showing proofs of payout. I told my partner about it and told me that what I am doing is a complete waste of time because he encountered same thing before, and I should just focus here in the forum and in my campaign. I got mad at him when he told me that and told him that he should just support me. We just agreed to disagree then. But after sometime, when there's nothing happening with what I am doing, I realized that he was right. I was indeed wasting my time. So yeah. Shame on me. Haha.

Most of the telegram channels with that kind of opening message, it's better to avoid them and never waste time checking them.

As long as someone has your telegram account/username, they will add you as they wish so if you suspect someone is doing that to you. Block them.

I receive 'investor' messages almost daily, I'm so tired of them that I have started blocking all messages from strangers right away.

Wow, nice thread OP it is informational and I guess scammers nowadays are rampant. I hope that there could be more users here that are new and able to see read over this. Surely there are more than this but this is a good example though.

Most of the scammers are comfortable in telegram because replies can be done quickly like a text message instantly will be able to reach the receipient.

Good job their OP. Hopefully these scammers will be busted with their wrong doings.

The present problem is that scammers have different device to operates,their always search for new methods to deserved people in order to obtain their money or coin.
Everyone have to be conscious because it's easy to scam people currently.

I have an experience about telegram scam. For some bounty token distribution, team members ask 2/3 USD ETH from participants for the transaction fee. I posted to a such telegram group for one of my problem. Shortly after my post, the admin send me a PM and ask 2 USD ETH for sending me token. I sent 2 USD ETH. But after a while I realized he was not an admin. He used the admin's profile picture and username with just a digit change.
2 USD is not enough money and that's why I sent him ETH without judgement.

I would like to advice all telegram users that if any admin PM you in telegram, you should check his username very well.

I also got those messages. Since I entered some groups I got a lot unwanted messages. It became that much that I almost left all the groups.

The worst was when the add you to some other channel together with 100s of others.

This is not true. You can also restrict people who can add you up to groups on Telegram; I'll try and write out the process: "settings>privacy and security>groups>'who can add me to groups' (you select as you desire, best to choose contacts only)>there is also an option there to add exceptions, that's you can include contacts you do not/want to add you notwithstanding"

Ive often got same experience like this before, so I change my account to private and contact only. Its annoying when you wake up that your account has too many telegram groups that you nevered joined with.

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Telegram is the worst place you wanna hangout due to many scammers. One time Im asking on Binance English, about certain transaction, and someone pm me, from that moment I knew she is not from Binance, cause admin never pm as they note on their profile. Avoid talking to strangers and your safe from these bastards.

During the ICO peak, it was not an infrequent practice back then to either impersonate an Administrator, or to completely take over the channel during an ICO sale (alleged hacking). People were in a rush to send their ETH to the given address, which was often published on the ICO’s telegram channel.

Due to the rush to buy (some popular ICOs sold-out pretty soon), many people did not contrast the information with the ICO’s webpage, nor did they verify that the person making the announcement was really an Admin. They inevitably ended-up giving their funds to the scammers (which might have been the result one way or an other, as it turned out …).

Let's try that too to make my account private and contact only. I only use Telegram for some groups and bots and not for daily use so I am not that familiar with it.

What about the Telegram bots (API) or website which ask you to connect your twitter or Reddit account to be able to participate in their social media task so as to earn tokens. Is there any possible scam or compromisation of social media accounts?

In addition is country withdrawal restriction.
Here an unknown user chats up with you and tell you to register on an unknown trading platform that s(he) is restricted from withdrawing in her country, promising you a huge amount of dollars if it actually works out, but at end such user asks for minimum deposits from you before the processing done completely. Be careful with this trick too.
I have chosen simple approaches to avoid telegram scam dudes.
[1]. Ignore unauthorized chats from any user,
[2]. DM admin first in any project, any first DM is impersonating admin to that project.

For a lot of scamming activities happen around especially in social media, its gonna be ourselves to protect our own. I believe that we all have the same experience receiving a message from an unknown person pretending to be a part of a certain group or company that would like to give a hand to you in making money, improve your cash flow. It is gonna encouraging but all of these offerings have something behind and a trick than most newcomers had fallen into their hands and lose their money.

It is our discretion to think if this person is willing to help or not, but most people who have come to you offer these things have only one goal, and that is to win over your trust and then scam you. They are good at first but you can find out later on, in the next top-up they will start to change and finally gone.

That is also my problem, a person can add me on a telegram group  even i did  not ask for it, every hour  i joined a new telegram group, all i do is delete every telegram that i joined in.

You can also report this group first before blocking them, some members are adding you to these channels they made it their business to add members without permission, I think we need to create a thread about telegram channels that's doing this to increase memberships, this is unethical and groups that do that are potential scammers.

If that's your problem then you should change the settings about who can add you on telegram group without your consent. I have been added on telegram groups without knowing until I found out. Until now no one able to add me on telegram groups but DMs still going on for quite some time.

I had the same yesterday again. I was posting in this topic and when I opened Telegram I was already added to another group.  >:(

Great list of scam bots on telegram, Telegram is just a social media platform that crypto community used in order to share information about projects, etc. Meaning anyone could create some fake projects in the platform or just make a similar community to legitimate projects.  So for a lot of scammers mostly go here in the Telegram platform because it's easy to scam some newbies that don't have the knowledge or just getting started in cryptocurrency.

I think it's just better to play safe as always in the platform just do not give such information that scammer could use to still your funds etc. It's true that legitimate project use telegram but still unless the community doesn't recommend by the owner or something don't fall for it. Scammers are always finding a new method to scam your funds in the telegram.



I think most of the time suspicious names are most likely to be a scam, and mostly some accounts in the platform that dm you or offering something is a scam.

Most of the people right now are going to find a way to help with their problem to get want to earn and this is the use of the communication tool telegram. Many people are asking about different groups like :

Where is the best platform to make an investment?
What is the market price of the bitcoin good to make an entry point?
Someone help me to earn bitcoin
I want to earn bitcoin

Those are the common questions of the newbie on the telegram group I always read, of course, there are a lot of people makes a direct personal message to them and pretend that they are helping also if you are trying to contact the admin of the pages some of them telling you to need to register here and makes an investment. It's better to learn from your self and gather the information that could help you to earn not being dependent on others.

We all know that there are. a lot of people the telegram because they don't have any friends understood the related questions on their investment or in cryptocurrency so this is the thing they usually visit just to ask questions but still this is the platform which is having a lot of scammers with their projects because they know there are a lot of newbies right there.


Thanks for this information because right now I'm having struggle with the number of groups invited me on their projects and I want to remove all those because it's too much annoying for me.


Right now the report is nothing and if you are trying to block those channels you can still make a trouble because after a few days there are another groups invited you and it's too much hassle to block them its better to go the same thing according to the quoted above.

If you go in the bounties section in altcoin, you will find many spreadsheets which contains telegrams ID of the thousands of bounty hunter. Those scammer can easily get all the relevant telegram IDs and then add those in their own group or they can even message them individually and see if anyone can fall into their trap.

The scammer action starts with collecting telegrams ID data from spreadsheet and it would be sad if the manager didn't hide the email so you would get lots of fraudulent messages on behalf of a big exchange project. Avoid any messages from strangers and the project team never calls you first.

The use of telegram is actually similar to other social media. They are probably to be used as a scam. As you said, I have found some types of scams from telegram as I ever see.
Here are the most scammers impersonate th other people and ensure like th others. Moroever f it is scammer, we will be more seriou than holding it.

That is why personally we must check and recheck the types of scammers. if it is a personal account impersonating as admin, it is better to check their username of telegram. Commonly, they have made little bit changes in order to deceive the victims. Additionally, please remember that commonly admin will never PM you first in order to help you from solving any cases. The official admin will accept and process the Pm that is entered to them. It is different from the scammers whether they will always send PM first and ending to deposit in a certain specific wallet.
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What to do next if you see these scams in person? Report them to telegram of course so those accounts will be taken down or tagged as scams.

From telegram FAQ: https://telegram.org/faq



Someone also created a channel to compile list of scammers. You can check it here https://t.me/s/Scammers_list

Yes it is. There are plenty of scam bots that are too good to be true rewards. I forgot their names but when I tried to play free bots before now some bots have a tagged SCAM on their profile. That indicates that the bot were proven to scam dozens of user.

My advise is find a better investment method and dont rely on cloud mining style on telegram. I never heard such legit one there so far as in 0%.

Instead of wasting time why not learn online how to do staking, trading and other means of earning that is fair and square. Not big but at least its real.

right decision ,reporting first is the best way to prevent these scammer because at least with so much report their accounts will be banned though it is so easy to create too many account in telegram because there are members  have been in group that when they don't like the management of groups?they will bug the whole chat room with hundreds or maybe thousand of accounts that even Blocking from the admin cannot carry the pressure.