Through a casual conversation with a criminal, we discovered 143 identical scam websites. Here’s the whole story.
We had already seen some of the types of scams that criminals have developed using Instagram and their modus operandi. This time we are dealing with a real conversation with a criminal, who used Telegram to attract a potential victim to invest in a scam project.Â
On Telegram anyone can contact anyone, it is enough to have the username or phone number of a person.
Criminals often take the usernames of their victims from groups, in this case dedicated to the crypto world.Â
They start by sending a greeting message, hoping that someone will start the conversation and then after some jokes the criminal talks about a method to earn Bitcoin.
As the conversation goes on, we ask the scammer if they can provide us with any evidence of what they are saying, and the criminal provides us with a website (http://dailycryptosmine247.com/) and a screenshot of the transactions made.
When analyzing the data we can see that these are actually valid transactions, but if we look at the addresses then we will see that all of them are from different addresses and this means that these transactions were probably taken randomly and sorted in a list to make the system credible.
At this point, a user might visit the website and try to register, but the platform provides an error after entering all the parameters (first name, last name, email, mobile number and our bitcoin address, which is all the necessary data for a criminal to identify the victim).
Moreover, if a less experienced user were to use the same password elsewhere, the criminal could try to breach all platforms with it and retrieve other data.
The website contains various information, such as investment plans and also information about the relevant company with the company number which is: #11445991.
If we write this number on Google, we will find hundreds of different websites but with the same layout, same company code, same plans, same people, same office and so on.
This shows that they are not fake evidence, but that these systems are cloned endlessly.
How to defend against scam websites
Lastly, bear in mind that if someone contacts you to offer you incredible earnings, the first thing to do is to block them and report as spam so Telegram can stop these criminals and limit the spread of these scammers.
It is also possible to use some tools to check suspicious addresses and legitimate websites if they have already been reported by other users.
We have reported all the suspicious sites which are 143 detected by our investigation.
