A new type of crypto-scam?
October 9th, 2024 | by Saren Tasciyan | posted in Hacking, Society, Technology
I guess you heard of cyrpto-scams by now. I think that I stumbled upon a new type of cryptoscam. Or maybe not. Can’t tell but here are some juicy details…
It started with a random group and community appearing on my WhatsApp account. I am going to blur some specific details to cover my own identity and potentially personal information of potential victims. This is supposedly from Binance. I had an account there for free coins many years ago but did not actually use it ever since. So maybe they have my data from somewhere. First, they appeared as 2 communities/groups. A general discussion group and a seemingly Austria specific group.
Did you notice the Austrian parliament in the images? This must be specific for Austrians. But when you check the participants list, half of the numbers have non-Austrian country codes.
Interestingly, I was not able to post any messages to the group. But their “Admins” were. First two people, who posted something had quite interesting pictures.
It screams to be AI generated. A Google Image search leads to bunch of Facebook and LinkedIn pages with the same image used in different contexts. e.g.
Here is the other one, which did not look like AI generated initially.
Indeed, Google Image search lead to a picture with Boss watermark.
So, first messages were introduction and an explanation why not everyone can send messages.
Summary: to stop spam and advertisement. I think that they are automating the whole process with LLMs and translations. Btw, this is the only person, whom I was able to identify with someone with a rather likely match in real life. I am not sure if he/she is behind it or his/her picture is simply stolen.
After some introduction, people with the rights to send messages start to say how lucky and thankful they for being invited. Obviously, they are trying to build trust by showing that other members are trusting this group. All those foreign and Austrian numbers are all speaking German (they all sound like ChatGPT :D). I went and check some Austrian numbers by “attempting” to send a message. Otherwise, WhatsApp does not reveal their profile picture (in the group list). Roughly, 50% of them did not have a profile picture. 40% had a picture obviously not taken in Austria (ok maybe they used their travel picture). Some were hard to tell where. Only 2-3 profiles looked genuine (with family, selfies at home etc.). I was not able to search their images, since Google is smart enough to block personal image searches. I will also not share them here. I wrote to those with seemingly genuine profile pictures to warn them about a possible scam. None replied back so far.
Furthermore, I reported all groups and communities. Some groups no longer exist but I was invited into new ones. Structure of these groups are all the same. I am following roughly what is going on. I tried to contact one of the main admins aaaaand I got banned from my own WhatsApp account. I think this is because of me sending identical warning messages to 7-8 people, who were not on my list. I asked WhatsApp to review this ban and they unlocked my account after 5-6 hours.
Someone asked and was recommended to install an app called “Trust Wallet”. I don’t know what it is but probably nothing particularly “scammy” with 50M downloads on Google Play. (I would still not use it though)
I will add significant updates here…
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