BREAKING: Telegram CEO Officially Confirms Gramtoken.io ICO as FAKE

As reported to Finance Magnates, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has officially confirmed that the Gramtoken.io website claiming to be the host of the Telegram ICO is a scam:

This is scam. Be careful.

— Pavel Durov (@durov) January 15, 2018

The tweet came as a response to Twitter user @kavingchng, who asked ‘Sir, is gramtoken.io Telegram’s ICO?” Other than this response, no one from Telegram has made any statements directly referencing Gramtoken.io.

Although TechCrunch reported on Gramtoken.io earlier this month as if it were the legitimate Telegram ICO, suspicions arose as Telegram made absolutely no mention of any blockchain-related projects anywhere on any of its social media.

Additionally, some Twitter users have pointed out that Gramtoken.io was registered on January 1, 2018 with Namecheap and uses the Cloudflare service, while Telegram is registered on GoDaddy and uses GoDaddy’s SSL certification service.

Over the last several days, Twitter has been abuzz with crypto community members warning each other of the scam.

SCAM alert #telegram #gramtoken all sites promoting telegrams proposed ICO gram are scam https://t.co/iVyt788vFW No announcement has been made by the company when its happening. BE WARNED

— Ross Stokes (@bitcoinexpertz) January 15, 2018

A Seemingly Sophisticated Ruse

The erie thing about the Gramtoken.io scam is that it really seems to be legitimate--the website has a well-designed front end, a relatively well-written Whitepaper Whitepaper A whitepaper is defined as a pitch or persuasive, authoritative, and often in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem along with a respective solution. Marketers rely on whitepapers for a variety of reasons, most simply to educate an audience about a particular issue or to promote a particular methodology. In the cryptocurrency world, a whitepaper is a document that should contain all of the information about the technology that was used to build a cryptocurrency network, and ho A whitepaper is defined as a pitch or persuasive, authoritative, and often in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem along with a respective solution. Marketers rely on whitepapers for a variety of reasons, most simply to educate an audience about a particular issue or to promote a particular methodology. In the cryptocurrency world, a whitepaper is a document that should contain all of the information about the technology that was used to build a cryptocurrency network, and ho Read this Term, and does appear to have been collecting ETH in exchange for the ‘GRAM’ tokens that will “power” the fake Blockchain Blockchain Blockchain comprises a digital network of blocks with a comprehensive ledger of transactions made in a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or other altcoins.One of the signature features of blockchain is that it is maintained across more than one computer. The ledger can be public or private (permissioned.) In this sense, blockchain is immune to the manipulation of data making it not only open but verifiable. Because a blockchain is stored across a network of computers, it is very difficult to tampe Blockchain comprises a digital network of blocks with a comprehensive ledger of transactions made in a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or other altcoins.One of the signature features of blockchain is that it is maintained across more than one computer. The ledger can be public or private (permissioned.) In this sense, blockchain is immune to the manipulation of data making it not only open but verifiable. Because a blockchain is stored across a network of computers, it is very difficult to tampe Read this Term, the Telegram Open Network, or TON.

Typically, scams in the cryptocurrency space are marked by badly designed websites with tons of spelling mistakes, and are easy to spot.

It’s not yet clear who is responsible for the elaborate scheme, or where they might be based--Gramtoken.io lacks any sort of information as to how to contact anyone involved with the project, though it does list the real-life members of the Telegram team under the ‘Our Team’ section of the site.

Despite the lack of an officially dedicated announcement or tweet decrying Gramtoken.io, Telegram does seem to be aware that the fake ICO is one in a series of scams related to the company circulating on the internet. Pavel Durov posted this tweet in late December 2017:

Attention: Telegram publishes its official announcements only at https://t.co/ePcweVcGCP. Everything else is most likely scam.

— Pavel Durov (@durov) December 23, 2017

Finance Magnates reported on two of them yesterday in addition to Gramtoken.io--a website called ‘Tgram.cc’ and an email scam offering GRAM tokens (which don’t actually exist in the first place) for $0.15 apiece.

It’s not yet known exactly how many people have lost their ETH tokens to any of the Telegram related scams. In the meantime, please be aware that as cryptocurrency becomes an increasingly normal part of our everyday lives, crypto-related scams may continue to become increasingly difficult to identify.