Beware Telegram ICO Scams

in #crypto7 years ago

Telegram is one of the hottest applications in use today. "If an ICO doesn't have a Telegram channel, don't even think about investing in it", is a refrain I heard this week - from someone who doesn't invest in ICOs, and as a US resident who is not an accredited investor probably couldn't even if they wanted to.

Telegram has been a popular breeding ground for scams of all kinds. Most ICOs have to repeatedly post on their Telegram channel "we will never private message you" and "don't send money to any addresses other than from our web site". Personally, as a professional ICO investor, I find the signal-to-noise ratio on Telegram basically useless. Everybody is either asking the same questions about whitelists and ICO dates, or they are trying to scam the rest of the "community".

Still, there is no denying the popularity of Telegram, which has 170 million users and is run by Russians out of Dubai. Recently they announced their intention to raise $1.2 billion by issuing their own token GRAMs and building their own blockchain TON. "Tons of grams" sounds like something out of Narcos, but this move is seemingly backed by Silicon Valley venture capital heavyweights Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Benchmark Capital and the cream of the crop of mainstream media like the Financial Times and Recode.

The problem? They haven't actually announced their ICO date, but sites are cropping up all over the Internet pretending to be them and asking for you to send money.

The scammers have gone to some trouble to add the familiar trappings of ICOs such as countdown timers, percentage sales bars, pre-ICOs, referral bonuses, white papers, roadmap, pictures of the actual team.

Screenshot 2018-01-27 18.56.19.png

The 132-page "Leaked White Paper" was featured on TechCrunch, but questioned on CoinTelegraph.

The scammers were even running sponsored Facebook ads:


Screenshot 2018-01-27 19.19.04.png

Known scam sites include gramtoken.io, tgram.cc, ico-telegram.org, gram-ico.org, ton-gram.io, grampreico.com

One way you can check out a site like this is to enter the site URL in Whois.com. Many of the sites listed above were registered with "namecheap.com" with privacy protection on. This is not automatically a guarantee of a scam, but it's a red flag that indicates you should may want to do some more due diligence.

Another way to protect yourself is to install the EtherAddressLookup plug-in for Chrome.

Screenshot 2018-01-27 19.16.52.png

Basically, if it is from any URL other than the official company web site, don't go near it.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said:

Screenshot 2018-01-27 19.38.55.png

It sounds like the Telegram scams have even followed him to the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Screenshot 2018-01-27 19.45.19.png

Will the actual, official $1.2 billion ICO with its vision to reinvent the blockchain with "infinite sharding" turn out to be any less of a scam? That remains to be seen...

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another scam site seems to be ico-telegram.me;

durov Pavel Durov tweeted @ 24 Jan 2018 - 17:48 UTC

I am unlikely to take part in any dinners/events while in Davos, so please be careful with events that have me as their “confirmed guest”.

durov Pavel Durov tweeted @ 23 Dec 2017 - 00:14 UTC

Attention: Telegram publishes its official announcements only at telegram.org. Everything else is most likely scam.

Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.

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Thanks for the heads up.

Thanks for this info! telegramfoundation.org is another scam, and a highly polished one.

Telegram ICO is definitely a scam.But the platform it has provided currently helping lots and lots of new comers who is either investing first time or who is unaware about various process to participate of ICO,Its official communications etc......There are always 2 sides of every good work,one side is good and other side is bad.

One way telegram is helping all ICO investors by immediately replying to investors queries and other way scammers are active scamming new bees.
but one thing i wanted to say loud and clear is that crypto world itself is full of uncertainties and people whoever coming here to make money should know this world first before stepping in.

Learn telegram how it works,learn how ICOs works and then invest,you may not succeed initially but you will not get caught by those scammers.

Telegram are having a legitimate ICO, and have raised US$850 million so far out of their goal of $1 billion. The ICO is not open to the public, which has created an opportunity for the fake scam ICOs.

#Nexty company is very promising and has a place in the electronic money market. Very happy, I enjoyed Nexty project.
#crypto #bitcoin #altcoin #NTY