If you're part of a cryptocurrency community, it's common to be approached in Telegram by "listing agents" who want to help you "get listed" on their exchange. I've come to the conclusion that 100% of the time, these messages are coming from scammers.
Usually, a reasonable way to verify if someone actually does work at an organization they claim to represent is to have them email you so you can email them back. You can verify the domain is correct for the website of the actual organization you think you're talking to, and if you reply back you know you're talking to the real exchange once they reply to your reply. It's very easy to fake a "from" display address and use a different reply to, but if you email an address at the actual valid domain and they reply back from the valid domain, you have some confidence you're talking to someone at that organization. I won't get into DMARC, SPF, DKIM, and other email validation protocols.
If they spoofed the header when sending to you and you reply back to the actual organization, they will either ignore you or reply back saying they didn't send the message.
Often it's an obvious scammer because the domain of their email will not match the organization. In this case, it was quite interesting in that it looked like it was correct. It seemed to be oĸex.com. But... looks can be deceiving. It's possible to encode special characters (such as a delete character) so if you copy it directly you'll see it's actually:
xn--oex-cva.com
I DO NOT recommend viewing that url in your browser.
It may be an attempt to attack your computer.
If you did put it into Google Chrome (don't!) you'll see:
Thanks, Google. :) I'm glad to see they are keeping up with the scammers in this case.
If you look really carefully you'll see this is just another phishing attack example using special characters:
The "k" is not a normal K. As you can see from the original email that I copied the domain from, it appears onscreen to be completely normal:
But if you go and "view original" on the email, you'll see the funky domain name:
The lesson learned here is that organizations wanting to contact a project will go through official channels, not use direct messages to members of the community.
Don't fall for this and don't even respond to "Hello" messages as they are 100% a scam also.
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As a community, we need to protect what we value. We need to name and shame those who spend time and energy attempting to extract wealth through fraud instead of creating value through honest effort.
Along those lines, here's our scammer friend on Telegram. Feel free to report and block them:
And here's our message back and forth:
It's sad to think how much wasted effort exists in the world. Talented, capable people could be creating value we all benefit from but are instead trying to scam others. Maybe they don't realize they could do so much better for themselves financially if they took their skills and efforts and helped people instead of trying to destroy them.
I hope you learned something from this post and will use that information to protect yourself and the people you care about.
Many scammers come from countries where employment rate is very low and once they start scamming people there is no coming back from it. The world has many people who believe others easily without questioning.
Maybe they are also trying to find an exit from the harder way of life.
On the other hand the scammers know that doing hard work will take a long time to achieve something big. So they choose the shorter way.
I once confronted a scammer who wanted to know credentials of my bank account. They at the end did not apologize but gave me some details about the way they scam people. Most of the time a police personal is involved in all this, helping them throughout the scamming.
The person also told me the amount they made every month taking money out of people's accounts. And you'll be surprised to know what even a single scammer can make from robbing people.
They made around 10 Million Indian Rupees Per Month, which is equivalent to $128,000. Making this much money in a country like ours is a huge milestone.
I have also seen news of a scammer who made close to $150,000 per month scamming people. But they were not alone. And, were caught after some local sting operation.
I don't think this is going to stop in near future.
But we as a society can do our part.
Here is a video from YouTube.
James gave this presentation at a Ted Talk and I love the way he handled the situation. He wasted the time of the scammer and saved other from being scammed.