Fraudulent TON Investment Ads Reportedly Circulating Facebook

Fraudulent advertisements have reportedly begun circulating Facebook offering to join the Telegram Open Network (TON) investment platform.

As Russian news outlet Kommersant reported on Sept. 20, ads promoting the so called “Successful Investor” account appeared on Facebook. Once clicked, the ad leads to a website disguised as Russian economics and technology media outlet RBC, where a publication — which looks like an investigation article — has built-in links to a site with a video featuring a “unique scheme” of earnings and a form for registration supposedly for the TON platform.

After users divulge their email address and telephone number, the scheme promises that they can easily earn $150 to $235 per day. According to whois, a service for domain searches, the domain was registered on Aug. 30.

The TON platform has not yet been released. In late August, three anonymous investors in Telegram’s $1.7 billion private initial coin offering said that Telegram confirmed it would issue the first Gram tokens by October.

Earlier this month, Telegram rolled out its TON testnet explorer and node software on its website, two months ahead of its planned launch of the Gram digital currency.

In April, Cointelegraph reported that Telegram opened access to a private testing version of the TON blockchain to a select number of developers. Anonymous test developers said the blockchain demonstrated “extremely high transaction speed.”

Software startup TON Labs, which is managed by Telegram’s token offering investors, is reportedly building a Solidity compiler for its blockchain. This programming language is primarily used to develop smart contracts on the Ethereum network, thus making the TON blockchain compatible with Ethereum DApps.