Rule number one: never provide your private keys or seed phrase to anyone!!
Never, not in a DM, not on a form. You NEVER give this to anyone.
Check your Settings
Go to “Privacy and Security” in your settings and make sure to adjust them where needed.
- Phone number: highly recommend setting this to ‘Nobody’ or ‘My contacts’
- Calls: highly recommend setting this to ‘Nobody’ or ‘My contacts’, this prevents strangers from calling you.
- Groups & channels: set to ‘My contacts’, this prevents from being added to scam groups, more about that further along in this article.
Setup 2 Step verification
Two layers of security are always better than one! It’s fairly easy for scammers to clone your SIM card, so the more security steps the better.
Admins will NEVER DM you first
If you are running into an issue and ask a question on a group chat, you will probably get messages from friendly people that want to help you, what a nice community. Wrong! These friendly people are about to scam you, just block and report them, wait for an admin to ask you to DM him/her. Don’t forget to check if it’s an actual Admin though, you can see if someone is an admin when they talk, you will see the title in the top right corner of the chat bubble.
You can also check it by clicking on the name of the channel and checking the members. An admin always has a star next to their name.
Make sure you are in the right chat
Always verify if you are in an official project group chat. You can find the details for these chats on project websites. Scammers copy complete channels! They use the same name, the same icon, they even copy the admin's names and avatars (because Telegram thinks this shouldn’t matter) and afterward add all the users (except for the real admins) from that chat to their channel. This is why you should set your settings so only contacts can add you to a group, like described earlier. They will even have conversations with fake members so it looks like it is the official channel!
This one is for projects: ask other projects to mail their offers
If someone is offering a listing, a promotional service, or any other service involving money, ask them to send you a mail from their official account. Even a mail can be spoofed or manipulated in ways (changing an o for a 0 for instance). Spoofing can be a bit tricky to spot, but if you follow this link you should be fine (the details are in the header!).
That’s it! Follow the commandments and thou shall not be scammed!
