t.me scam

A fake crypto project scam involving cryptocurrency was reported against the website t.me on 9 September 2026. On 8 September 2026 I paid for a "VIP" subscription to a Telegram gold-trading signal channel, "Gold Sniper" (t.me/goldsnipersignals, ~17,000 subscribers), sold by the operator using the Telegram handle @johanwfx. The channel's pinned message advertised VIP access at $299/month or $399 lifetime, payable in crypto, and appeared credible because the operator publishes each week's past signal group publicly as an archive. I sent 300 USDC on Ethereum mainnet to the address the operator provided, 0xFd0f2cE8047772Cc2e195D4992ba3270Cca46BB4, at 21:23 UTC on 8 Sep 2026 (tx 0x4110f2e2388f7198c329f6d9015b8932c863628a611daca4fc3d283ee19bff4a). After payment he attempted an upsell ("$99 more for lifetime"), which I declined. He then sent two Telegram invite links that granted no access. By the next morning the operator had deleted our entire conversation, removed me from the free channel, and blocked me. On-chain, the receiving address is not a trader's wallet but part of a wallet-drainer operation. About six hours after my payment (03:41 UTC, 9 Sep 2026), address 0xec103C6E7e3a674eeBC580797FeA1b4f9258b915 sent an EIP-7702 type-4 transaction (0x839657870649ade127c56513700f2e00b7805d89d10e6ec86c36273740341d79) that delegated the receiving wallet to the Etherscan-flagged phishing contract 0x69e6bd1C4082403Fc7917a61F6216552fC1a541D (label "Fake_Phishing5942181", deployed 24 Mar 2026 by 0x38A3Cb1C068de0D04BFa0D07a1604D519f63b04a) and in the same call swept my 300 USDC to a collector wallet, 0x7e8E348f33c332Ee6527f0F43F3b569cB0279Aa5. That collector holds roughly 943 ETH (~$2.3M), received around fifty separate small USDC/USDT deposits from different wallets in a single afternoon on 9 Sep 2026 (amounts from $50 to $12,997), strips airdrop tokens (BLUR, PHA, OXT, FLT) from delegated wallets, and cashes out in five-figure USDC/USDT batches to HitBTC Hot Wallet 4 (0x80787af194C33b74a811f5e5c549316269d7Ee1A). The Telegram channel appears to be a recruitment front for this drainer operation rather than a genuine signal service. Loss: 300 USDC (~$300 USD). Wallet addresses linked to this report: ethereum: 0xFd0f2cE8047772Cc2e195D4992ba3270Cca46BB4, 0xec103C6E7e3a674eeBC580797FeA1b4f9258b915, 0x69e6bd1C4082403Fc7917a61F6216552fC1a541D, 0x38A3Cb1C068de0D04BFa0D07a1604D519f63b04a, 0x7e8E348f33c332Ee6527f0F43F3b569cB0279Aa5 Do not send money or cryptocurrency to anyone connected to this report. If you have already paid, contact your bank or exchange and report the incident to your national fraud authority.