Who’s Who? The life and times of a Telegram scammer

When it comes to running an ICO, nothing is more frustrating (and hilarious) than a new breed of shape shifting Telescammers

Ever played Mafia? It’s a party game where everyone is assigned the role of either a cop or a thief, and each person tries to convince the crowd that he’s the good guy. For the last few weeks, we’ve been playing Mafia almost 24/7 — except this time it’s not at a party, it’s on Telegram.

What was once touted a refreshing change to Whatsapp, has now become a breeding ground for a garden variety of scammers, spammers and snake oil salesmen. In some ways, the anonymity Telegram provides a user is useful; but in my personal opinion, Telegram places an extremely high barrier of entry to newbie crypto investors that are just entering the ICO market.

I can think of at least 5 people I personally know who would have lost money on Telegram — and that’s not a good thing. While a portion of the community claims you need to have the basic intelligence to tell a scammer apart from the crowd if you’re going to “make it” as a crypto-investor, I’d like to disagree. As early champions of this nascent space, we’ve got to build a safe space for newcomers to get a feel of the waters before they dive in and start throwing words like “hodl” around. It kind of is our responsibility, especially as the ecosystem matures.

With Enkidu’s ICO around the corner, we thought we’d write an article about some of our more hilarious and bizarre encounters within the wild wild west that is Telegram!

1. The Spiteful Impersonator

Shashank from our team often manages the telegram community channel. Imagine my surprise, when he messages me asking me if I’m “pleased with Enkidu’s service”. If someone PMs you on Telegram, it’s very hard to tell the difference between real and fake. Sometimes, there’s a one letter difference in usernames, but when you’re extremely busy, you fail to notice it. Because anyone can send anyone a text on telegram, impersonators can easily convince an unsuspecting individual that they’re part of the ICO team and solicit funds. What’s more, just 5 minutes before our presale went live, these folks appeared out of nowhere and sent everyone on our telegram groups a PM, asking them to transfer funds to their own accounts. Lucky for us, we have a smart bunch of investors, who ignored the scammers outright.

In their quest to scam people, they ended up sending me and another admin of the group the exact same message they would send a general member of the audience. My only reply was “Are you stupid?” and he immediately countered with this:

Probably doesn’t get out much, poor soul.

At Enkidu, we have our own solution to these scammers.

Say hi to Sankalp

Meet Sankalp, one of our recently joined interns, who manages some of our Twitter social media. Sankalp is also a part time graphic designer, and his specialty is Microsoft Paint. Whenever there’s a scammer in the vicinity, we unleash Sankalp on them. Here’s a screenshot of how Sankalp works on the attack:

Meet Sankalp, one of our recently joined interns, who manages some of our Twitter social media. Sankalp is also a graphic designer, and his specialty is Microsoft Paint. Whenever there’s a scammer in the vicinity, we unleash Sankalp on them. Here’s a screenshot of how Sankalp works on the attack:

Another poor scammer who goes by the name of “Jenny” faces Sankalp’s wrath: