The founder and head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, on Saturday, April 28, warned his readers on Twitter about malfunctions in the messenger due to overheating of cluster servers. Crypto scammers managed to take advantage of the situation and collect thousands of dollars in a short time.
After the message from the head of Telegram, the attackers became more active and, apologizing, invited users to go to a site where they were distributing cryptocurrency. For a plausible imitation, scammers were able to steal the verified Twitter account of the Swedish musical group Club 8 and remake it as Durov’s official account. They clearly succeeded, since the deceived users believed that they were dealing with the official Twitter account of Pavel Durov.
The false account posted a message about the distribution of the Etherium cryptocurrency to everyone. The message contained links to dubious sites where it was offered to receive from 5 to 100 ETH in exchange for 0.5 to 5 units of Ethereum sent to them. Wallet addresses and QR codes were also indicated there, with which you can send them cryptocurrency. However, according to Metamask's warning, it is not recommended to interact with ETH wallet addresses due to the fact that they have phishing detectors installed. The scammers took the time to falsify a scale in the style of the Etherscan website, supposedly showing how many coins they had already given away.
To be more convincing, the creators of the fake websites wrote on behalf of Durov and offered to give away cryptocurrency as an additional apology for the failure of the messenger. Despite the low credibility, the scammers’ trick worked and about 147 people became victims.
In just a few hours, $29 and $27 thousand were received from just two actively promoted wallets. $5 thousand and $800 were transferred to two other wallets. In total, the scammers received more than 61 thousand dollars. Most of Durov's fake accounts are still active, and their tweets have not been deleted.
This is not the first time that technical problems with Telegram have made it possible for scammers to launch fakes on behalf of Durov in order to defraud users of their cryptocurrency.
Pavel Durov himself has not yet given official comments on the situation, but is engaged in the fight against blocking of the Telegram messenger. On his page on the social network VKontakte, Pavel Durov called for a rally for Internet freedom. Today, at 14:00 in Moscow, a coordinated protest rally against the closure of the Telegram messenger and Internet censorship began.. By 14:30 Moscow time, about 6.8 thousand people had passed through the frames to the site where the rally was being held. According to available data, a similar event is planned in St. Petersburg on May 1.
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