Last night I went through a scam where the fraudsters “dumped and escaped the order book” on Telegram (TG) — I was cheated out of 6,000 USDT. I think it’s necessary to share what happened to help prevent more people from falling for it. Here’s how it went.

A couple of months ago, I met a person I’ll call “Brother Suo” and added his TG. Last night, the two of us chatted about recent trading. Then the fake “Brother Suo” asked me whether I had any Ethereum spot. He told me to first transfer some to him to use, and that later he would transfer it back to me. I said I don’t have any spot, I don’t hold any — I only trade futures.

Then the fake “Brother Suo” said, “Then transfer me a few thousand U first. It’s urgent.” I agreed. I asked, “Can it be 2,000 U?” The fake “Brother Suo” replied, “3,000 U.” So I transferred it. After he received it, he asked again that I was short by a bit, and asked me to transfer another 3,000, and he would return it to me at 0:00. I didn’t say much and just transferred it.

Finally, after I received the money, for the third time he asked whether I could make it up to 10,000 U. He said it was urgent, so he needed to “make it full.” At this point I already felt something was off, because normally he wouldn’t ask again and again like that. Why didn’t he just ask for 10,000 the first time? If he kept asking like this, it would mean it wouldn’t stop after this transfer.

So I refused, saying that futures trading needs to top up margin — I needed to pause and ask “Fat Brother” first to confirm whether Brother Suo’s TG account had been compromised. When I transferred the second time, I actually had a slight suspicion already. But when I checked the past chat history, all the historical messages were still there. I thought, maybe Brother Suo’s account was fine — we’d been chatting on and off for several months.

After I asked Fat Brother, and Fat Brother contacted Brother Suo by phone, it turned out there was a problem.

Analysis shows: the very earliest TG I added was actually the real Brother Suo’s TG. But that TG had already been stolen earlier. That means the scammer could log into my TG on other devices. Last night I also saw two login locations. Both were in Thailand. That same night, in the early hours, the scammer deleted the chat window between me and Brother Suo.

Then he created a fake “Brother Suo” account with the same avatar (with a red “1” added — basically a TG scammer tag indicator), and also changed to a username that was basically the same. The only difference was that the letters were I vs l (capital i and lowercase L are almost indistinguishable). Then he copied and synchronized the conversations between me and the real Brother Suo into the fake “Brother Suo” account.

Because the fake Brother Suo account was controlled by the scammer, and my account could also be freely logged into by the scammer, the two accounts could send messages back and forth automatically. For the past two months, I had been chatting normally with the fake Brother Suo account for two months — I never noticed anything wrong.

So when I made the transfer last night, I didn’t suspect anything either. I could still see the prior chat history. Only on the third transfer did I start to suspect something.

In the past conversations, the fake Brother Suo acted like a “relay” to pass messages. He had even chatted with me for months. The scammer really laid a long line to catch a big fish.

So this is a very classic scam — everyone should take it as a warning and avoid being fooled. Be careful when transferring money online. Even if you must transfer, verify from multiple sides and don’t be careless. Also, if you use Telegram, you must remember to enable two-step verification. When you log into a new device, you need to enter your password — it will protect you much more.@alert的会所 >