Scammers took advantage of a malfunction in Telegram to steal a crypto currency

Fraud in the work of the popular messenger Telegram Paul Durov used fraudsters. In just a couple of hours, the crypto-purses advertised by the fool account of Durov in Twitter dropped about $ 60,000. The account is still not blocked.

The reason for the large-scale disruption on March 29 in the work of Telegram in Russia and European countries was the disconnection of electricity supplied to the company’s servers. This was reported on Twitter by the founder and head of the telegram messenger Pavel Durov.

A little later Durov promised that the supply of electricity in the near future will be renewed, so “cross fingers” …

Scammers did not sit around too. Under these real posts of Durov appeared fake messages from the account Pavel Durov @durhiov that as an apology Telegram users will be offered compensation in Ethereum. All the details are promised by the link http://ethg.st/

The site itself is promised distribution to 5,000 ETH. To participate in the promotion, you must send 0.5 to 5 ETH to the address encrypted in the QR code, and in return will receive a prize in the amount of 5 to 100 ETH! Those who send more than 1 ETH are generously promised a bonus.

The record of the action in a fake account collected about 1000 likes and 45 reposts. It became enough that in an hour the swindlers, having had time to use the “falling of the cart”, could collect about 8.30384559 ETH or 3 500 $. Another purse was replenished by $ 28,492. A total of 5, found Group-IB purses, now about $ 60,000.

It is worth noting that for more efficiency, scammers used to disperse the post by bots, which indicates a well-planned action and readiness of attackers to react quickly to events, raise posts up, “wind up the hype”. The fake account was created in September 2017, and the site – on March 26. Another important fact is that under the post in the fake account there were a lot of comments from the “happy winners”, which once again pushed the rest to participate in the lottery.

Some of the users of Telegram felt a dirty trick: “I sent money but did not come back.” How do I get it back? “.

“The classical scheme of social engineering was used: scammers played an unpleasant incident for Telegram users and promised them to participate in a certain promotion, where they can become owners of a large cash prize for modest money,” comments Ruslan Yusufov, Director for Special Projects Group-IB . – Its role was played by the credibility of the leader Telegram, in the branch of which appeared a fake account, apparently not in any way distinguishable from Durov’s real comments, which he gave in his topic. It is gratifying that careful subscribers were still more and the fact that they tried to warn the others. However, many people have fallen for the bait of scammers. In addition, it still remains an open question whether one of the purse used by fraudsters or the amount of damage is much greater. “