In a new phase of crypto-madness, desperate investors wanting a share of the pie are losing cash to opportunistic scammers, a January 20th report warns. The hype surrounding the forthcoming ICO for Telegram is huge, for a global chat app which already boasts some 170 million users. Their white paper was fortuitously "leaked" well ahead of the official March 2018 launch, but this seems to have afforded the unscrupulous a chance to set up "pre-ICO" sites for unwary investors.

The much-lauded ICO promises to be a record-breaking event, with a fund-raising goal of $1.2bn, although new reports suggest this may be expanded to $2bn. The Telegram Open Network (TON) project, which will issue TON tokens to raise the funding it needs to expand its system with Blockchain, was announced at the latter end of 2017.

Big hype and cribbed legitimate details give scammers an ideal opening for creating fictitious ICO sites: the main culprit, Gramtoken.io, and also Gramtoken.tech have now been taken down, but sites including grampreico.com, ton-gram.io and tgram.cc are still online. Promoting their sites on Facebook, email and Twitter, such sites represent a dead loss in Bitcoin for anyone unwise enough to be caught.

Pavel Durov, Telegram's CEO, has told users only to rely on Telegram's own channel for genuine ICO information.