Its absolutely ridiculous that people are falling for this. I'm noticing the same pattern in every single telegram group. Not a day passes without me getting a "privileged presale offer" through pm by folks masquerading as an admins of these ICO groups. I'm not sure how to fix it though.
Thanks @magpielover for your comments and it's good to hear from a admin for one of these groups to get your perspective on things. I don't doubt you guys have a difficult job to do without these scammers making things harder.
I've seen people a lot of people say these chat services like Telegram/Discord and so forth are good for support, but to be honest I think they are only good for the companies who have none or very limited resources for user support. The user experience is never great with these systems. Take for example, when you have thousands of users online at the same time, such as hours/minutes from the start of an ICO. Hundreds of messages get posted every minute. It's pretty much impossible to read any messages during this time. The only way to get a message across is for the admins to pin messages.
TBH, I think solving the issue of ICO scammers, requires a multi-pronged approach. But just on the social channel like Telegram, there's a few things that could be done to reduce the opportunity for scammers. Here's a few things I think could be done to improve things.
Only allow admins to post to Telegram channels during ICO
I've seen some admins freeze the group just before a token sale until it is concluded. Not sure if it's possible to ONLY allow admins to post in a Telegram channel, but on the lead up to and during a token sale, like a 4-6 hours before, it might be a good idea to lock down the channel until the sale has concluded (for the red hot ones anyways that sell out in minutes or hours). Obviously for sales that will run for days, this is not practical.
Stop leaving important details till last minute
Part of the problem I see is that teams leave the important details until the very last minute. Important details like individual caps, gas limits and gas prices and contract addresses are often only shown last minute leaving a lot of people in panic mode. When you have panic and confusion, it makes it easy for scammers to strike. Best to communicate important details early and in a controlled manner so everybody can be prepared and ready.
You don't have to show the full contract address, just show the last 4 digits or something like that. They could consider using services like Clearify to help identify legit contract addresses.
Allocate more for the public sale
Instead of allocating a large chunk of the tokens to the presale/private sale whales who number in the few and are probably already rich, teams can try allocate a higher proportion to the main sale so that there is more to share between the masses. This will avoid the fiasco that we saw recently with the WePower and Bee Token token sales where main sake participants had ridiculous caps of 0.1 ETH to begin.
Limit the size of the whitelist pool
Don't over subscribe the whitelist by a huge margin. Sure I understand that not everybody the joins the whitelist will end up sending funds but surely a large portion of them will. Again, pointing to Bee Token and WePower, those were two that were clearly massively oversubscribed which led to ridiculous individual caps.