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.
The 132-page "Leaked White Paper" was featured on TechCrunch, but questioned on CoinTelegraph.
The scammers were even running sponsored Facebook ads:
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.
Basically, if it is from any URL other than the official company web site, don't go near it.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said:
It sounds like the Telegram scams have even followed him to the World Economic Forum in Davos:
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...