Telegram has been home to all kinds of scammers for quite some time but a new trend in Telegram scams seems to be gaining a fair amount of traction:
Enter the AMA scam, that’s not new many will say but this one has a significant twist to it.
Julian and Jennifer aka Investors of Crypto will show up and offer projects a free ama session.
The thing is that once you send them some coins to incentivize participation, the crap has just started. Reuben Yap describes his less than satisfactory experience with the clowns in this Twitter thread:
PSA: A Telegram community group @invstrsofcrypto with Telegram community: https://t.co/0lhOtRayE7 is running a scam and have targeted several projects. Their modus operandi is to offer you a ‘free AMA’ and then ask you for prize money + translator fee, and then ghost you.
— Reuben Yap (@reubenyap) January 10, 2023
We reached out to @Bigpiggy01 from the Raptoreum project as well having seen him comment on the thread, he tells us:
“They are extremely smooth, they have posts in their channel showing fake amas with other projects which adds a strong sense of legitimacy to the whole deal!”
As if that wasn’t enough they had AMAs advertised with several other projects who all confirm the same story of: “Once prize money is paid, they hit you with random extra fees then ghost!”
One fairly serious item of concern with this is their possible affiliation with an as large community as what Mellobit appears to be:
Sure this is not the most lucrative scamming out there, it is however a drainer of resources and moral, if a project tasks volunteers or staff with say producing marketing material for something that never happens. Those resources could have been much better allocated elsewhere!