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.

Vault12 offers you a Personal Information security GPT to answer questions using our collected mix of expert articles. Try it here:

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-MTZnRKo73-personal-info-security-wizard.

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.

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".

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:

@wasima

@max_vault12

@commagere

@pavlo1

@anastasiapopova

4. SIM Swapping - Another potential attack risk

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.

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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

Vault12 offers you a Personal Information security GPT to answer questions using our collected mix of expert articles. Try it here:

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-MTZnRKo73-personal-info-security-wizard.