AmaZix, a blockchain advisory firm, today launches the first global blacklist of Telegram users. It gives any Telegram group the benefit of free protection against users posting malicious content, as well as access to its blacklist of over 54,000 banned users, a list that is administered in real-time by AmaZix’s 24-7 team of channel moderators.
In 2017, AmaZix started developing automation tools to help support its network of moderators that were supporting Telegram groups on behalf of its clients.
A majority of projects in the crypto space have established Telegram (or Discord) groups in order to encourage open dialogue with their supporters and investors. However, since the days of the early ICOs, crypto projects have found they had uninvited guests in the form of scammers and fraudsters, and AmaZix’s global moderators acted as the front line in halting these criminal attacks.
“Scam activity in Telegram groups is a major problem in crypto. Every one of the 140-or-so groups that we’ve moderated have had some sort of scam activity. As soon as a project gets traction, the scammers move in. Telegram offers the criminals complete anonymity, so they use it with absolutely no fear of reprisals. Through our service, which takes the form of a bot that is added to a group, we offer free, real-time threat intelligence for Telegram. As soon as a user posts malicious content on any of the groups we monitor, they are automatically be banned from all our groups, and added to our global blacklist. Our blacklist already has over 54,000 banned users, built over two years of monitoring Telegram traffic. Our hope is, by opening access and encouraging more people to use and contribute to our service, we will catch the scammers even more quickly. This will effectively discourage malicious activity on Telegram.”
– Jonas Karlberg, AmaZix CEO
AmaZix’s Moderation Stats:
- Since it began, it has seen over 730,000 Telegram users across its groups, of which it has banned over 54,500 (7.5%) of users
- The service, which has today been launched freely to third parties, has already deleted over 68,000 malicious messages across over 140 groups
- Approximately 300 users are currently banned daily
AmaZix’s List of top criminal tactics that take place on Telegram:
- Impersonating admins and direct messaging users
- Posting fake offers or giveaways on the main group
- Cloning social media sites or websites, and posting links to these sites
- Phishing other users for private keys
