How to avoid scammers

Sadly as with any big community on Telegram, there are participators around attempting to impersonate official staff members and direct messaging you in private in an attempt to scam you.

As soon as you’re on Telegram and not familiar with it yet, you may notice that our official staff have “Won’t PM you first” in their name.

This means that our staff, no matter if this is in their name or not, will never PM (private message, direct message) you first.

This ensures that none of the official members of our community will ever get directly in touch with you for whatever reason. You are always required to send them a message first, or simply contact our helpdesk in case of questions.

Below you can find a couple of examples of impersonators which contacted our users in the past. This way you can learn how to spot the differences and red flags.

Examples

Once you’re around a bit longer, you’ll also notice that you can see the groups in common with someone. Scammers usually have only one group in common with you or none at all. Either way, getting a message first from someone seemingly being an admin, should always raise a red flag.

Generally speaking, as soon as you get a direct message from anyone out of the blue it should always raise a red flag. We have no reason at all to direct message you first and we won't due to the above reasons.

How to spot an impersonator?

Rule of thumb

None of us will ever contact you first. You will always have to initiate a private conversation (direct message) with us first. Not the other way around. Ever.

If you find yourself in a situation where someone contacted you first and claims to be staff or an official of our team (he isn't) and you still want to verify yourself if you're talking to the correct person, you can follow these steps:

With the chat with the person in question open, click on their name in the header of the chat. This'll open the more info tab about this person.

Then verify the following:

• Is there a username? - Scammers either don't have a username at all or use wrongly formatted usernames (more on this later)
• Groups - A scammers account won't share a group with you. Click on the Groups Tab at the bottom to show which groups you have in common with this person. If he has no groups in common with you at all something is definitely wrong

However, the above is a special case, because this username actually exists in 4 variations:

1. Cryptowally <- This is the real one
2. CryptowalIy <- Scammer
3. CryptowaIly <- Scammer
4. CryptowaIIy <- Scammer

Even though it appears like the above 4 variations look exactly the same, they aren't and this is exactly what scammers on Telegram do to confuse you.

If you run the above 4 variations through a tool like convertcase.net and select the lower case button at the bottom, all 4 variations become visible:

1. cryptowally <- this is the real one
2. cryptowaliy <- scammer
3. cryptowaily <- scammer
4. cryptowaiiy <- scammer

While the original uses only lowercase L for his 2 Ls in wally, the Ls can be replaced by uppercase i and the difference becomes nearly invisible.

Rule of thumb, again

We won't send you any message first. Never.

In case you've encountered such an impersonator attempting to scam you, forward any of his messages to notoscam which is a Telegram owned Support Bot against scammers. They will read your message at some point and ban the scammer from Telegram.

Common cases of scamming which we've seen happening in the past are:

• Send X amount of ETH to this contract to validate your license
• Send X amount of X to this address so that we can change your license key
• Validate your ETH Wallet (Gunthy Wallet Address) with this dApp

None of the above cases is true. You will never have to send money for your license to get validated nor will you have to pay for a license key change.