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Vault12 Blog

How to Protect Yourself From Impersonators on Telegram

As members of our Telegram community, you may encounter scammers impersonating admins and others — please read this article to understand how to avoid entanglements.


If you do not want to be taken advantage of by scammers, please remember:

  • None of the Vault12 team members will ever ask you for money or cryptocurrencies. You should NEVER transfer any to them. We will never ask for you to send your contributions to a wallet address that we provide on Telegram. All crypto transfers related to Vault12 are found in your Vault12 app.
  • If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
  • Never give out your personal details, even email addresses on the Telegram chat. If an admin gets in touch with you via a private message, make sure their username (listed below) is correct before engaging in any discussion.

1. Check Your Telegram Privacy Settings

Telegram gives users a number of privacy settings to control information being accessed, e.g. your telephone number. Make sure you've reviewed the settings to hide information that doesn't belong in public.

Image of Telegram Privacy and Security Settings

Telegram Privacy and Security Settings

2. Identify admins

Check if they have "admin" titles beside their names on the Telegram channel member list.

To see the member list, just click on "members" or "info".

Admins for Telegram group

Look for the admin or owner tag

3. Check member @usernames to determine if you are talking to the right person

You may get messages from scammers pretending to be team members with their exact same photo/avatar and a very similar username. Please report those accounts to TG so that they get banned.

Just click on the photo/avatar of the person you are talking to, to check their username and compare this with our list of admin usernames:

Official Vault12 team members:

Telegram admins

@wasima

@max_vault12

@commagere

@pavlo1

@anastasiapopova

4. SIM Swapping - Another potential attack risk

SIM swapping

The other common attack is via a SIM swap, this is where your phone number is ported to another device, followed by account password resets — the recovery codes now being under the control of the criminal. To guard against this you need to implement 2FA with an app such as Authy, and to have your carrier explicitly forbidden to do number ports to new devices without verifying identity. Please see this article for more details: https://www.wired.com/story/sim-swap-attack-defend-phone/

5. Remember these two things

* Do not transfer your funds to addresses received in private messages
* Block and report any suspicious behavior and spam messages — this will help Telegram remove these impersonators.

Join Us on official channels for current updates

Team: https://vault12.com/team

Blog: https://vault12.com/blog

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Vault12_

Website: https://vault12.com

White Paper: https://bit.ly/vault12-whitepaper

Announcement Channel: https://t.me/Vault12official

Support Channel: https://t.me/Vault12

https://linkedin.com/in/wasima
https://twitter.com/wasima
https://startag.xyz/wasima
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Wasim Ahmad

Wasim is a serial entrepreneur with five exits, and an advisor in the fields of AI, blockchain, cryptocurrency, and encryption solutions. At Vault12, he led the private and public fundraising efforts, and focuses today on expanding the Vault12 ecosystem. His crypto experience began with AlphaPoint, where he worked with the founding team to launch the world's first crypto trading exchanges.

Previously he was a founding member of Voltage Security, a spinout from Stanford University, that launched Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), a breakthrough in Public Key Cryptography, and pioneered the use of sophisticated data encryption to protect sensitive data across the world's payment systems. Wasim serves on the board of non-profit, StartOut, and is a Seedcamp and WeWork Labs global mentor.

Wasim graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and French from the University of Sussex.

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