A few days ago, I wrote this post, and in it I talked about my most recent experiences with telegram scam. They were in two cases: One typical, and the other, a little different from what I’m used to seeing.
The typical case is the usual, “hey, sign up on x and y and z to make 25% profit a day”. From jump, you can already tell that this is a scam. IWe’ve seen this more times than I can count with ponzi schemes so it was pretty easy to spot. I still played around with the scammer a little though, making her think she just got a victim. Eventually I dropped the act and confronted her, and as you’d expect, she went ghost.
The second case….This guy was different. And I wish I meant that in a good way. He’s style and approach was completely different from the ones I’d seen, both in normal ponzi schemes and with the “click to claim airdrop” phishing comments on Hive. He didn’t message me with “join our platform and earn crazy profits” or to click any phishing link. He inserted himself into a platform I was already in, and my guess is that he takes a random pick at the telegram group members in there to take his chances. The platform I’m referring to here is Hive, and the telegram group I think he tracked me from is the hive.io telegram group.
Now, this isn’t hard facts because I can’t tell for sure where he followed me from, but I’m positive because that’s the only explanation that makes sense. So here’s what he did. Not sure you can make meaning out of the chat though, because he deleted his part of it.
Basically, he messaged me asking if I had some Hive and when I said I did, he made a proposal to buy me out at $1. Ding dingggg. That was a red flag right there and I knew he was bad news already. Not that I was planning to sell to him anyways, because it’d be a big risk selling to someone I don’t know when I could simply sell at an exchange. His scam was leveraging on my greed to sell at an unrealistic price. But you know, if you play some music, I’m going to dance. So that was what I did – Dance.
I switched up my English as soon as I decided my play to make me look like a dumb dumb inexperienced Hiver he could scam and patiently followed through to see how he’d try to “outsmart” me.
Next thing he said after his offer to buy 500 Hive at $1 each was that he wouldn’t send me payment first, and that he knew I wouldn’t send my Hive first either. This would sound like a genuine person afraid of risking his money and assuming you were smart enough not to risk yours to trick you into thinking he was legit. Lol I smirked when I saw that. He was actually making it fun. Not like the regular stuff I see everyday with these lazy telegram scammers.
To fix our little dilemma of who sends who funds first, my dear scammer made a second proposal – and this was where I found his scam – he suggested since no one wants to send his funds first, why don’t we use an escrow to hold a P2P trade. But he didn’t just suggest we use ANY escrow. He just happened to have a very specific escrow “he already uses and trusts”. Isn’t that wonderful? What escrow, you might ask? Gittradex.com.
After he suggested his escrow, I pulled up some trustpilot and scamadvisor ratings and reviews of it and it just got interesting. I was honestly less concerned about the ratings, but more about the reviews because even Binance doesn’t have a very good rating, but it’s still “safe” or relatively as far as I’m concerned.
Anyways, I found that the gittradex domain was only 3 months old. Like come on. Very sloppy move right there. If you want people to fall victims to this scam, at least have some sense to buy up and use an old domain. No one in their right mind will use an escrow that has only been around for 3 months with only 2 reviews from what don’t sound like humans. Some people might be more likely to trust you if it looks like you’ve been around for a while. Just saying.
Of course I didn’t need to do any of this extra stuff to be able to tell that it was a scam, but I enjoyed it. So after doing a bit of digging on their website. I went ahead to message my “friend” back on telegram telling him I was having issues creating an account. My plan was to have him take some time off his “busy” schedule to assist me create an account, but I dropped the thought because it was getting a bit boring now. I created a gittradex account on a separate phone with my scam-indulging email with no access to any important shit I had, then I messaged my "friend" back telling him I registered and that he should send money now. Lol
Next thing, he asked me to deposit my Hive then, and pretending to be some newbie to scam and all, I told him I didn’t trust the site so I wasn’t going to do the deposit. Then this time around, I suggested something of my own. I suggested we use Binance P2P, and the scammer started raving on about how Binance was different from an escrow and all and how I’m stupid for not getting the difference. I think after I mentioned Binance P2P, he realized he got made and ghosted.
Funny thing is after he ghosted, I completely forgot about him until when I wanted to write this post a few days ago and went back to the chat to find that he had deleted his entire side of the conversation and deleted his account too, probably in fear of exposure. Like bro you’re done for already. At least the ponzi girl had the balls to just ghost and not delete her account.
My guess is that he and others were the ones behind the gittradex escrow exchange and that they have a team consisting of people like him who lure people to deposit their funds in there and it's byebye after that. I've once deposited my funds into Olymptrade before and it took threats from me to report them to my country's regulatory bodies to get them to release my funds back to me. There's details about that in my intro post if you want to read about it. I've gotten myself into a lot of shit.
I’m not sure if anyone else had some sort of encounter with this guy here, but I’m hoping not. I’ve seen and joined many scams, but the approach he tried to use with me is pretty new to me and I’m sure if they did some adjustments to their approach, a lot more people are going to fall victims. This post is just me educating people about my experience and warning the community to stay sharp out there. Peace✌