Dancing With Scammers: The Telegram Tango Investigation

Scams are a multi-billion-dollar business, maturing in their ability to target and take advantage of victims every day. This makes it crucial to understand the criminal operations in detail.

Infoblox Threat Intel's latest investigation, titled "Telegram Tango: Dancing With a Scammer", offers a unique, firsthand account of a threat researcher’s journey through a scam, providing valuable insights into the mechanics of cybercrime.

One gray morning, our threat researcher received a seemingly innocent Telegram message from Arabella, offering a lucrative remote job with no experience required. This led to a whirlwind adventure through a fake job offer, cryptocurrency demands, and some potential AI-driven interactions, highlighting the absurdity and danger of these scams. Arabella's message included a logo for "Corner Office Consultants" and the domain cornerofficeconsultants[.]com, were both legitimate and from a real business, but Arabella was part of a scam.

Over the following days, the researcher interacted with various accounts, performing meaningless tasks and trying to avoid paying cryptocurrency that the scammers requested from time to time to continue. Soon after accepting the job offer, another "employee" named Maria provided a job description for Marble Media, a real company, but the domain marblemediaseo[.]cc was a lookalike. The researcher registered an account on the lookalike domain and performed monotonous tasks, clicking “Starting” and “Submit” repeatedly, only to be told he needed to deposit money to continue working.

The interactions likely included a mix of AI-generated and human responses. Some responses were nearly instant and lengthy, while others took longer even if the message was shorter. The researcher suspected that some responses may be automated, but it was not clear whether there was a process to hand off the interaction to a human.

The researcher was able to trick the scammers and withdraw some money before they finally caught on. This makes this investigation not only educational and insightful but also a small moral victory against the criminals. The investigation revealed that crypto scams continue to be a lucrative method for bad actors to steal money. In 2024, consumers reportedly lost an estimated $9.3 billion from crypto scams.

This research you can find here is part of an ongoing series of reports on findings about groups operating scams worldwide.

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