Telegram's widely publicized initiative to integrate the TON blockchain and its native token Toncoin has attracted scammers promoting a scheme to make money from referral links.

Analysts from the cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab are warning the crypto community about the emergence of a new fraudulent referral pyramid associated with commercial projects of the Telegram messenger. Scammers claim that any messenger user can earn a lot of Toncoin tokens simply by distributing referral links.

Scammers are promoting a “super secret booster bot” and referral links as the key to earning Toncoin. Participants are invited to invest their money in purchasing a “booster” tariff, and then invite friends to the project using a referral link. After this, they will allegedly be able to receive passive interest in Toncoin tokens from the amount of investment of invited persons.

To initiate a “profitable project,” the victim is asked to initially buy from 5.5 to 501 TON on a legal P2P market, crypto exchange, or through the official Telegram bot. After that, she is asked to deposit starting digital assets into the account of the booster bot’s crypto wallet, which is actually managed by scammers. Next, the attackers ask you to select a booster tariff: “bike”, “car”, “train”, “plane” or “rocket” and “start earning TON”.

Kaspersky Lab experts warn that after digital assets are transferred to the booster bot account, the choice of tariff plan does not matter at all, and the assets will be irretrievably lost. To make the project more convincing in the eyes of a wide range of “potential partners,” the scammers recorded training videos in Russian and English, as well as detailed instructions and a large number of explanatory screenshots.

For example, following the instructions of the scammers, the victim of deception creates a closed group on Telegram, where he posts several educational videos about the “earning money” scheme along with his generated referral link. The abundance of these videos on the Internet indicates that a significant number of victims have already fallen for this fraudulent scam.

In January, the founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency pyramid scheme IcomTech, Marco Ruiz Ochoa, was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in attracting investors.