Filmgrid Diaries 20190531 - Telegram Scammers

After the announcement in bitcointalk, we began to receive a lot of attention in our Telegram group, unfortunately also the unwanted players arrived; I mean the scammers. They have represented a loss of time and effort, since in the intention to respond to all the messages we receive, we have to follow up on these as well. With service offers of all kinds, with false profiles, impersonating YouTube influencers and even a member of our team.

It is a pity to run into this type of person, at any level, with a pressure attitude as if it were a telephone debt collection agent. I want to tell you about the ones that I have found the most curious: the supposed YouTube Influencers.

The first to contact me was "CryptoBud" (@TheCryptobud) offering me a project review service in one of their videos; knowing that he sometimes carries out sponsored reviews, I research in the CryptoBud channel and an online search, I did not find any reference about his presence in Telegram, in fact for business issues one have to look for him via email. I decided not to get too involved in the conversation and only commented that I did not have a budget for videos. The user shared a tab of services and prices, which were not cheap but not crazy, with a pleasant attitude ... my intuition tells me it is a scammer, but I can not verify that it is or not, so I leave it in pending.

Later on, I received a “hello” from "Crypto Bobby" (@roycrypto_bobby), before answering, it took me less than a minute to find an online Crypto Bobby tweet claiming a fake Telegram profile.

https://twitter.com/crypto_bobby/status/974771484366331905

Well, here there is no doubt. I had some time and a lot of curiosity, so I started a conversation with the supposed Roy, who turned out to be very persistent trying to sell his $1000 USD video review; I leave it at peace. The next day, a call from him awoke me, didn’t answer but immediately message me reduced offer. Since I no longer had time and wasn’t funny anymore, I blocked the user.

I also received an offer from a "Michael Gu" (@boxminingy, yes with a Y and the end), this time I did not even bother, just block the user.

It is impressive the dedication that these people have to the development of their scam, I doubt that there is any YouTube influencer that reaches out for "clients" using Telegram, and less with a large number of subscribers in their channel; in fact I have found that it is really difficult to get an answer from some of them. Others are more open and even honest in reference to their services, as is the case of Crypto Crow, on his website you can find prices and description of the service he provides; something I found very curious in the particular case of Jason Appleton is that he only accepts BTC, so when his false profile contacted me, I asked if I could pay in ETH, he immediately answered that payment could actually be made by that means, sharing his ethereum address (new, without transactions) with me ... heck, as he insisted on his payment.

Allegedly scammer ETH wallet: 0xEa82Eb6Dd932d02DA69eA6A29DE2B065D910DEc3

To conclude, I can only say the following and to anyone who is reading this, remember the phrase "can’t be too careful", investigate in detail any person with whom you are going to make a transaction, particularly with cryptocurrency, it never hurts invest a little time in it, and if in the end there is doubt, better not to do it.