Bitcoin Forum

A lot of our community members work as community moderators and copywriters on various crypto projects. I am working on a few projects as well and i have faced a new kind of technique recently used by scammers and hackers that i think needs to be shared with our community members who work in similar professions.

Recently one of my project where I am working as a community moderator a guy dropped a message in my inbox asking for permission to write an article about the project and they wouldn't charge anything for it. It is a free community so anyone can write anything about any project so I told him to work on it we don't have any problems. So he asked me a few questions about the project and i gave him the answer. At the end he told me that he wanted me to sign a contract so that there wouldn't be any copyright issues. This sudden change of tone makes me more skeptical, and i tried to look at the link he wanted me to click and found that it had a javascript written on it. I don't want to share the link here as it has phishing elements on it. I had a similar incident before which i shared in the forum, so my mind told me not to click that link.

This happened a few weeks ago but today i got a similar offer and the only difference is that this new guy wants to take an interview with me. I don't know why he needs to take my interview to write an article about a project that has its whitepaper and blog site that contain all the relevant project information. I am sharing this event with the forum to spread awareness among the newbies. Maybe some of you have already faced similar issues.

This is another incident that happened to me that i have shared on another topic.[Scammers are getting innovative. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5461711.msg62633478#msg62633478)] You can read that as well and many of you might wonder why i am facing all this every time. I think it's because of my profession as a community moderator. A community moderator has most of the administrative access in the community server or channel, so he is the primary target of a hacker. Gaining access to a moderator account can give him control over the server which he can use to post phishing links. Similar incidents have happened with many projects recently. So guys beware of this as you can lose your job and your community altogether.

Never occurred to me before, But thanks for the heads-up. Indeed, scammers are evolving their ways to scam. We have seen our fair share of ways in our lives, but each time we find something new has emerged.

Managing a community on telegram or discord attracts lots of spammers and scammers. I mostly ignore personal messages after reading the first message and find it to be the same generic stuffs. The scammers probably pick up on these and get creative with their approach to get attention. Some ask questions about investing a significant amount and some try out what you experienced.

If you keep a cool had you'll notice all the tricks they try to pull.

A scammer can try any sort of social engineering to make you click on their phishing link, so don't click on random links as we always say and once a stranger you're chatting with starts acting suspicious or in a way that feels too good to be true, it is better to discontinue the conversation and avoid chatting with such a person again.

You say you work as a community moderator for different projects, i hope you don't keep your assets on the same device you use for all these online stuffs, if you do; then move the majority of your funds offline, that is the first and most important step in protecting your funds from scammers.

I observed a growing trend whereby the administration and  moderators of various groups are the target of scammers. From WhatsApp to discord and even Telegram, the mods are always the primary target of scamners.

Thanks for sharing this important information here as I know a lot of people have learnt part of how to protect themselves from scammers. Personally, I rarely click on any link that seems suspicious.

They are upgrading and trying to reason out as much as they can so that their links will be clicked by whoever they are targeting which is on your case, the writers and community moderators.

I may not be into this niche like you guys do but this is helpful for those that are doing the same thing as yours and for that, I thank you for sharing this new scam method they do.

It sounds like phishers are getting innovative with time, I haven't encountered any such incidents yet but JS (may or may not contain any phishing elements), to be sure while using new services like mixers, DEX and any other Dapps be careful and prefer to use their NO JS version, which is not usual still most of the service providers on their time of marketing and execution prefer this user demands.

Hmm, I had seen some newbies posting the paid links to be used in the personal text. You. You better be careful while dealing with them, they are more likely skeptical as well, I had heard of such members from community members reaching them with such offers.

I wonder if hackers are getting more creative or  we the users are getting more alert and informed on all these kind of data breaching methods these guys are using..and good to know you didn't fall for this attempt which would have been more damaging to your community.

Obviously trying to hijack their accounts so that they can spread their malware using an administrator/mod account  without the telegram bots flagging or deleting any malicious content sent from these accounts...

Yes, this is very similar to Fake Corsair job offers on LinkedIn push DarkGate malware. (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fake-corsair-job-offers-on-linkedin-push-darkgate-malware/) Wherein they will lure their victims on the guise that they will have a interview, and so they will have the supposedly victim to download something to fill some information. So once you download it, in just a matter of seconds, your hardware are already compromise and you won't do it.

But thanks anyway for this warning to the community. I guess we shouldn't really trust anyone, even if someone that we know, give us a link, we should think many times before clicking it. Very dangerous path that we are right now, as there a lot of cyber criminals targeting crypto enthusiast.

Scammers are improving their strategy on a daily basis. That is why we also have to be careful and smart. Before any action should be taken, you have to be extra careful, and make sure you don't fall victim at the end. Whenever I receive a random message, I always have it in mind that the person is trying to scam me. Even if the person is trying to assist me, I still see the person as a scammer because scammers are always acting nice just to get your attention. They will always want you to trust them so that they will be able to penetrate into you. From your post, the scammer contacted you and wanted to assist you in writing an article for your project for free. The scammer was acting like he wanted to help the project, but he had a different motive, if you weren't smart, he would have made use of the opportunity.

You received a PM from a stranger when you are a community moderator. The offer is too good to be true, free. Any good website with good traffic will do it without fee?

If that platform is Telegram, you can remember that user and watch it out for a while. After a few weeks or months, that account will be either a Deleted account or will be labeled as Scammer by Telegram.

What is Scam label on Telegram? (https://www.telegramadviser.com/scammers-in-telegram-and-how-to-report/)

Scammers are very innovative and won't stop until they get past through our own "force fields". They're trying to be one step ahead no matter how elite the security level of a specific platform is.

They even create state of the art malware that bypasses antivirus detection. As scammers and hackers are getting smarter, we should always find ways to do our due diligence and use common sense in order not to be victimized by them.

I am not exempted of that as I was too a victim of a similar type of scam. A year ago, a scammer pretending to be a CEO of a project (in which I have failed to triple check the Telegram handle) successfully penetrated my mind believing that he wants to collab with me and asked me to download the ZIP file and click the "NDA" which in fact is a fake PDF leading to my assets getting drained.

Be careful out there and stay SAFU as much as possible.

It's possible that this will never happen to me because I am not into the same profession as you, I could but I am not just the right person for such, I am not always good with stranger and I am always on my guild at a hundred percent when dealing with strangers, I have gotten several PM from standard asking me for normal things but the way I reply they knew instantly that they won't get anywhere talking to me.

I don't care what your relation might be with your profession, everyone online are there for a purpose and most times they are looking for people to prey on, if you fall for them it's on you, I always frown on strangers as no single one ever have a good mind towards me in the past, they always come to take advantage of me.

Thanks for sharing your experience in your field of profession, if anyone is doing the same thing as you they might have seen such or learn from this, I don't trust anybody and I will never lower my guide against any stranger, stay safe out there.

Scammers today don't worry about themselves like they did in the past; instead, they will consider how to catch your attention and persuade you to follow them. Some links are very dangerous because clicking on them will give the scammers a lot of information about your systems, your personal information, and everything to which you have access. I'm not sure about other people, but even if it were a joke, if someone told me to click on a link, I would ignore them because it is better to be afraid than to accept a risk you can't handle.

You know how some newbie are when it comes to making money online quickly, they always think that is the way they will make it and fall into the scammers' traps? Well, this scammers always come to mostly newbie because they know that the newbie in the forum will never know much about them, and they message them about investing and earn a lot of money that will make them feel greedy that they will not even think about it twice.

I have not experienced such a scam attempt before unless for the one when a dumped guy tried to cajole me into using a phishing link to sign into my account so that he could steal my log in information and on opening the link I discovered that he was making attempt to hack my account and I immediately reported him, I think the guy is ban now.


You have to be careful and that is the more reason that most project moderators don't allow for PM offers and as long as it belongs to the same community whatever needs to be discussed can also be discussed in the group without taking it to DM, and try as much as possible to avoid such contact

It seems that the next target of the scammers is the community leader of a group where he controls the group. And that's why scammers try to approach the community leaders and offer their cooperation. And it's true. This is a new scamming model that many people, especially community leaders, may not know about and thank you for sharing it here.

This needs to concern community leaders because they might use other methods. We know that they will use all means to get what they want. And it seems that they use deception in addition to using different methods.

I've never encountered a case like yours, but I came across some offers on Telegram, and I just ignored them all. I don't trust the offers on Telegram because I have experienced bad things. But there may already be some communities that have experienced this.

What you are saying is safe and logical to do but you can not always ignore your private message as there are investors and people who need support for the project. So I need to check all the PMs I got and scan all of them to get rid of scammers and legit users. Most of the time it is the community members who need help but getting messages from scammers is becoming more frequent than before. So I think those who are working in this field should be more careful than before.

Good work OP, I have also worked for many projects as a community moderator but didn't faced this kind of scam attempt yet. I daily receive personal message from unknown users(mostly girls) who wanted to gives idea of trading platform which I never Heard a name before this. first they start communication that he just want a friendship and then send a business proposal. I am 100% sure that this is also a scam attempt.

telegram is prominent platform for scammer to engage fraudulent activities. They have different method to entice newbie to fall in scam and it is necessary that we should have a knowledge of it. I am also looking to make a thread where i will include all their methods they attempted so far to deceive me but not successful yet.

This is something new I never read something like this, a screenshot of the conversation is just enough proof, we here in the community only ask for screenshots of the conversation or anything that can prove that an agreement has been reached but never a contract, and its a simple article writing and no money was involved I will be suspicious if I am asked to download something to sign a contract.
Only reputable companies like banks and insurance ask for a signed contract but never an individual, its good that you posted it here for awareness.

So it's just a phishing attack with a new story and concept. Phishing attacks are the most common ones and that's why I prefer users to keep their funds secured with a Hardware wallet and also use a more secure Operating System than Windows. JavaScript is required on every website nowadays and you never know which one is going to inject bad stuff in your PC's browser and can collect all of your keystrokes, with a key-logger which is way more harmful.

I should have taken a screenshot at that time as when i tried to find that old conversation, I haven't found it. I think the scammer removed everything or i have done it intentionally. Actually this is a common practice by the scammers: if they failed to make someone a victim of their trap they tried to remove everything. I think i will get similar phishing attacks in the future so i will definitely store some evidence for reference.

They are fast on that before they offer you that they could have done an investigation on who you are here in Bitcointalk so when they think that they are busted or you are suspicious they will delete the conversation, but what if their target does not have an account here in Bitcointalk, it will not be reported and they will continue to victimize more people.
Scammers are imaginative and innovative they could have used their talents to make money in legal ways but there are people who find their joy in scamming people.

These scammers first raise victims greed by offering free service or high but reasonable wages so that victims won't suspect anything. If someone is new to this sector and doesn't have enough work to do they will easily fall for such a setup. So if someone is responsible for a community's security and administration, he needs to be more careful about his response to all the PMs he gets.

Op this is very good notification and information. This awareness is not only to moderators but also to website administrators, developers and the users. Everyone is involved so the best thing to do is to be a security conscious about your accounts and dealing with people for your accounts details. Like last two weeks, someone called my uncle and told him that they compiling names on a political movement committee and his name is also one of them, so they would send number to his phone and he should send the number to them so they can add him up and he sent them the number and the hacker use the OTP to hack the man WhatsApp and changed the phone number to email address and add 2FA. And through the WhatsApp, the hacker hacked the Facebook. And almost a month now, the hacker has been trying to scam people from these two social media of my uncle. So we should be careful with our internet security details.

The first mistake we make in falling into a scammer's trap is of course because they are looking for potential victims who are greedy. And it is true that many people are tricked because of this trait, almost all groups can fall into this trap, from ordinary members to those who have a strong community.

Team scammers have many methods, nowadays they are all sophisticated, don't want to hear that people you don't know suddenly PM on Telegram or something else, you have to ignore them, don't reply or anything else. Especially with the promise of expensive fees or other benefits that can be said to be unreasonable, it is definitely a scam.

And if links are posted from a moderators account, it becomes believable to community members who will trust it and may not pause to double check the credibility of the links. Many community members will fall victim. There is another lesson which we can learn from this, it is that no matter where links are posted from, we just have to be careful clicking and following them.

This is interesting and I was wondering if you could still screenshot the link and upload it here for us to see it for ourselves. Scammers are always looking for means to.perpetrate their evil acts. Every day new tactics and newbies always fall victim of this scheme.

Since you are a moderator I believe this could be a discord community you are talking about as I know discord moderators always have that access to administrative informations and other important aspect of the project too that was why the scammer contacted you and I was also wondering why they could have the guts to tell you for an interview. What an audacious request from them.

Scammers are everywhere, we are seeing different ways of scamming every day. Some users say their wallet has been hacked or some say their PCs have been hacked etc. But when we listen to those both of them were hacked through different methods. So scamming nowadays is too viral and most scammers hack user's wallets. We should keep in mind, that we should always keep our strength strong whether we are using any Laptop, any phone, or any other source of electricity that is online connected.

We should only make its security strong, only then there will be more chances to make ourselves safe from these scammers and these ways of scamming. I don't think that through security a person will be 100% safe from scammers because I have seen 1000 scams on that websites and exchanges even though they had very strong security. But it is a precaution to save ourselves.

Thanks for sharing this information but there's one thing we have to keep in mind scammers and online theft always come up with new strategies once this scamming method is exposed they will come up with a new one.
One thing I will advise the experienced and newbie user to practice is never to trust anyone on the internet other than yourself because online theft also hacks people you know so well account and uses it to get to people who can entrust her with something valuable.

If you are working with a community it's not about trust every time. No matter if you trust a stranger from your community or not but you will have to provide support for their concern if you are a community moderator. Sometimes you need to see their screenshots, videos, and documents to get a better understanding of their problems. You can not deny helping them in a convenient way as this is what a community moderator does.

However sometimes you need to engage with investors and marketing agencies as well where you might need to do cross communication through URLs from different sites. The thing is you should be aware of how to handle such situations and how you can approach them without being a victim of a scammer. It is not that easy for someone new even some old dude, to fall for such a trap. That's why we saw some big project servers being taken over by hackers and used to promote malware through fake promotion.

This piece of information was actually really useful, tnxs OP, one way to avoid some of this persons sometimes is not giving them audience especially when they don't look genuine, or better still if you must give them audience always refer them to the white paper of the site.as an administrator it's important you be very careful who you respond to and do not click untrusted links, and if you must do out of curiosity, copy the link paste somewhere else, create a dummy account where which you can use to check out the link.that way you reduce your risk of your admin account been hacked

Interests to scammers are on a different level and there particular interest in moderators and those that own channels have been on the rise due to how much influence they can get out of the legitimacy of the service and users reputation. They understand the need for these influences and reputation but, can’t go through the time it takes to build one.
This adds to the log of reasons why you mustn’t always take these owners of channels and blogs to there every word. You just might not know when the hack is in motion.
As scammers continues to become innovative, you be curious on offers even when it wouldn’t cost you nothing. Nobody gives something for nothing.

Thanks OP for sharing these experiences, because scammers are now like wolves in sheep's clothinga to deceive unsuspecting victims. I guess that it's best to see every acquittance on the internet as potential scammers, this thoughts will help to keep our brains on the alert and lookout for any signs of scam during interactions. Sometimes family and friends will ignorantly share links from unknown sources to their loved ones, that promises different enticing offers, when you clique on the link, you'll be asked different personal questions, eventually you'll be directed to a phishing link. So it's also very important to verify the authenticity of links sent by trustworthy people, before attempting to engage in it.

I understand what the community moderator of a project has to go through in order to help the community user but accepting documents from them is never an option based on what I know and if you do not have a choice about a document you need to be careful because some online theft is sending malicious document which will give them access to the victim computer.


You have a point but you can't be too careful due to human error and I hope you're using good paid internet security.

It looks like they are already organized. Whether they are one person or working as a team, what they do is quite organized and intended to scam people. In fact, the target is not ordinary people or newcomers but moderators or group admins who in fact are aware and know very well that the admins or moderators are not new players in the crypto business.

Because of this, wherever and whatever the conditions, we must be alert to various things that come our way. Having a sense of suspicion and not easily trusting anyone here turns out to be necessary so that we can be more careful and not easily fall for scammers. Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience.

Scammers are always very organised that is why you see people falling for their tricks. There is never a crime scene that is not properly organised. All scam activities are well organised and coordinated from the little step they take till it turns out to be a big tit tat. However, admins are majorly their targets because admins and moderators have influence over their community and are listened to because they convey information from the project founders to the community so therefore if getting them is possible, they would so that they could lure the community through the hacked moderators and admin handle to scamming members on their platform.

Scammers/hackers have been too aggressive and really finding ways to get someone to fall into their tricks. Good thing that they are talking to someone who has the knowledge about their way of scamming but if this happens to normal people, I have no doubt that they become successful with their plan.

As the crypto community grows, scammers have been targeting us now believing that they have succeeded. Fortunately, as we continue battling these scammers, we are able to warn the community and avoid them.  

After all, I was too skeptical when someone sent links to me even to my friends.

If there's actually one thing I guide against every single day of my life is getting exposed to scammy activities... I don't even wanna be a part of it anyways   :P

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like I said in one of my post, I can easily sight a scammy Project when I see one... managing a community like you said actually has alot of vices to thwart your effort, but I'm happy you were very smart to overvome such a planned format... Let's be careful out there as that's what has been occuring in several ways, with divers formats too.

Sandra 🧑‍🦰

Working as a community moderator or any other profession requires the worker to be in touch with his community, respond to their inquiries, and verify what community members send can be risky. This is because not all community members are honest people. Some scammers try with all their ability to trap this worker who is striving to make a living. These scammers know that no matter what they send to him, he will not block them because it's part of his job.

Therefore, those in these professions should be careful and not open any link sent to them without scanning it carefully. The community moderator should receive the article's content written in text as a message or receive it published on LinkedIn or Medium.. etc., without including links from untrusted platforms. It is also better for community moderators not to use their primary devices to work in this profession. In addition, the security measures for worker accounts must also be increased, such as adding two-factor authentication and so on, as the field of cryptocurrencies is not free of scammers, so no one should put his trust in strangers, no matter how much evidence they have of them that proves the opposite of their malicious intentions.

Do we expect scammers to keep using the same old routine? Same old phishing attempt but with a new twist to the story every time.
I thought it wasn’t right when they requested your permission to write an article. That was probably thrown in the premise that you would feel important enough to be asked permission from and get you in a way, committed. Giving the attempt another go with a new twist wanting an interview.
His tone betrayed how desperate he wanted this part of the con to succeed and you were observant enough to notice it.

As a moderator and community manager, this will be difficult to avoid because scammers want to access and interfere a lot with the project you are managing. If they can't gain everyone's access, they will switch to copying project information and spreading malicious links that are not original content.
Nowadays, crypto-related community platforms attract a lot of people with bad intentions. An event that I remember about TG before was when just uploading photos in the group would have information hijacked, so be on high alert and always update changes as well as scam issues to warn everyone, thanks for sharing the OP.

There are certain measures that can be taken to prevent any sort of hacking attempt in Discord and Telegram. It depends on the moderator's knowledge and competent behavior to save the server from scammers. If anyone is working in such a sector then he should have knowledge about all the security parameters to secure his project server as this is what the project is paying them for.

This is an eye-opener. Now your unique position made you aware of phishing links. I can only think of the regular bitcoin holder without knowledge Javascripts links that contains code to steal a persons log information if the person clicks on it. Once a very important reminder that every bitcoin holder should have the basic knowledge about cybersecurity. There is no regret in this at all.

Never knew someone can be scammed through this way. Thank you for passing this vital information. Most times i see a lot of  private messages on Telegram and they claim to be support and all that. And I noticed something there is a new way of cloning personal telegram account where two different user will have the same username. I have see it one certain time and i was wondering how was this possible because I only know that Telegram supports one account one username. These developers should put a good use of their skills to were will profit them the right way and stop scamming people of their hard earned money. This is why it is good to have technical knowledge about a lot of things .

Can you tell us what was the outcome of that code ? I don't want you to share the code but only wanted to know what was the purpose of the scammer ? Was his purpose was to hack the coins, inject a malware or something else.

In most cases, people wouldn't be so techy to check the codes behind the link and may fall for the scammers trap. Scammers are getting innovative these days and its good that you share this new method that scammers may use and i was not aware of it before,

I think that scrept was supposed to give them my browser's cookies which might give them the information they needed to gain access to all the accounts I was using through that browser. Though i am not sure as i have never done it as those scammers want me to do but from my past experience and by observing so many server hack i think this would have happened. 

If someone is working as a moderator, he has administrator access most of the time. This responsibility demands a mind that can do critical thinking and has basic knowledge about technology, and i think this is the third time i am facing such efforts by scammers.