Monad Warns of Fake Ads in Official Telegram Channel
Monad’s community is on alert after Co-Founder Keone Hon revealed scammers placed fake ads in the project’s official Telegram announcements channel. This happened just before Monad’s first major token airdrop.
Hon posted on X (formerly Twitter) that attackers bought Telegram-sponsored ads appearing inside Monad’s verified announcement feed. This feed usually only shows official updates. The warning came ahead of Monad’s airdrop, scheduled for 1:00 pm UTC on Tuesday.
Scammers Target Users with Fake Claim Links
The fraudulent ads included links mimicking Monad’s upcoming claim portal. Hon urged users to ignore these ads and avoid clicking any suspicious links in Telegram’s ad placements.
He emphasized, “Do not act with urgency, and always triple-verify before doing anything.” The only valid claim site is claim.monad.xyz, which will remain open for three weeks.
Scammers seem to be exploiting the high user interest before the airdrop to lure participants to phishing sites.
Monad Token Trading and Telegram Ad System Under Scrutiny
- The MON token is already trading on Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures market at about $0.07.
- This price implies a fully diluted valuation near $7 billion.
- Monad is developing a Layer-1 blockchain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
- The project aims to improve scalability and speed with parallel execution, targeting up to 10,000 transactions per second.
- The incident raises concerns about Telegram’s ad system, which failed to block phishing ads despite strict rules against deceptive content.
- The fake ads violated Telegram’s policies banning phishing, spam, and misleading financial promotions.
