Safety against common Scams

We commonly come across users losing their moneys to various giveaways or impersonators. Being in a decentralised cryptocurrency means you as an individual are your own bank, and only you are responsible for protecting your funds. If you fall for any of these and you giveaway funds or share your private keys, nobody can recover your funds. Do your due diligence when operating your crypto, just as you would when operating fiat currency notes. Also, if you come across such a scam, please forward the messages or group information to Cardano Report To Admin group on telegram. Note to telegram users, we cannot do much if you forward a screenshot, please ensure you select the message from the scammer and forward it to group mentioned above.

Below is a list of common Gotchas to be aware of for common scam practices and ways to be safe:

Being added to a random group/channel(s) or getting calls

Often telegram users get added to a scam look-alike group with thousands of fake accounts. The content of the group may be promotional or try to push in a scam link. If you're not sure if you joined that group, please cross-check the list of official and community groups on telegram

To prevent getting added to such groups, please ensure your user settings in telegram is updated as below:

Free Giveaways/Promotion

"If it is looks too good to be true, it probably is"

Often users get pulled into promotional scams promising great returns. Beware of such promotions, there are no free moneys to simply grab online. This is a very common scamming method targetted towards users who are new to the digital financial ecosystem.

While the above is true for any platform, telegram is one of the most commonly exploited avenues for such scam operations. if you get added to such a group, please inform officials, and click the "Report Spam and Leave" option. Usually you would often also see a lot of users responding with confirmations to those Giveaway scams - these are mostly bot accounts, do not fall for them. Checkout a typical giveaway scam and fake user responses below:

Receiving DM from admins/ambassadors (Impersonators)

One other common scamming practice you often see on telegram is accounts trying to impersonate official accounts or personnels (admins/ambassadors). As part of your verification system to official channels, you were already warned about Impersonators sending DMs.

You can be sure that none of the official admins/ambassadors will message you directly.

These types of scams are pretty easy to identify yourself if you pay attention to details:

• You would often notice you do not share common groups with the scammers. The moderators from the official channels are diligent and actively try to keep impersonators at bay. But there are often proxy accounts hidden in groups which share and allow impersonating accounts to message users.
  
• They may mask the usernames to be similar (eg: rd1rt instead of rdlrt) or they may hide Username and add @rdlrt text to Bio instead. Please be on the lookout for such methods and verify Username as well as Bio when chatting with anyone in DMs.
  

Receiving DM from unknown users

One of the more common and amateur scam attempts would be scammers with fake user profiles (often using a model or an investor's photo in profile) will message you directly, and after a friendly conversation ask you either for assistance with stuck funds (asking you to share some funds to unlock theirs) or giving investment expert recommendations (often to a scam exchange/website). Simply forward the message to the admin group mentioned earlier, and report such users to telegram as spam. Few examples of such scam conversations below: