Scammers are pretty much like tardigrades, they always find a way to survive: except that good-guy-tardigrade doesn’t steal your money.

ICO scams have been long discussed and by now, with all the experiences collectively gathered in the cryptoverse, seems to be easier to put ICOs in the spotlight and expose scams. Now let’s talk about a particular issue that affects investors, advisors, ICO projects and the whole crypto space: Identity theft. It happens way too often, fake Teams and members are all over the internet.

If we don’t count investors and their money, the most affected with this major issue are advisors/experts and influencers. On one side you have scammy ICOs literally stealing names and pictures of well-known advisors/industry experts and introducing their golden teams, which at first sight may seem legit. On the other side, you have people claiming to be *insert random crypto influencer* on Telegram groups/emails, offering ratings, reviews, “Marketing strategy that can take this project to the next level and bring in thousands of big investors.”, etc.

How hard is it to verify identities? Probably won’t take more than ten clicks in most cases.

In the first scenario, you can try to find the advisor’s/expert’s official Twitter/Linkedin account. If they are indeed the advisors, or part of a project, there’s a 99.99% chance that they‘’re talking about it or promoting it on Social Media. If we talk about Telegram, it may be a little trickier to notice if the account is indeed the real one, as sometimes scammers may copy the actual username and slightly change it with an underscore (as an example), while some hide the account’s username and display the real username in the ‘Bio’ information, which may fool many who are not aware that Telegram allows you to do all this.

In the second scenario, the easiest way we found to check the veracity of the hundreds of profiles that pop up in our Telegram group is the following:

Google the name Find the original channel/account/website of the person they are claiming to be Ask them to send a private message from the real Twitter/Linkedin account

We haven’t received one single verification yet. These actions may seem obvious, but obviously not everyone takes this kind of measures, otherwise, maybe scammers wouldn’t be all over the place as much as they are. We wanted to share our opinion and the ways we found to fight this matter. Report, report and report. What other ways did you find to double check someone’s identities? Comment below and let us know.