Pavel Durov
Sergey Trukhachev, head of the Smart Business Alert service at ESA PRO, reported that over the six days starting July 30, the number of new domains mentioning the messaging app or Durov’s name increased by approximately 18%, while the number of sites showing signs of phishing doubled. On August 3, cybercriminals registered 11 domains masquerading as Telegram verification and security services, according to tradingview.com.
Pavel Kovalenko, director of the anti-fraud center at Informzashchita, noted that the situation was further complicated by the launch of the built-in non-custodial Gram wallet: Not everyone has had time to understand the new feature, a fact that fraudsters are exploiting by passing off fake platforms as official tools.
“Users are told that they need to ‘urgently verify their account,’ ‘withdraw assets before they are frozen,’ ‘exchange old coins,’ ‘get free tokens,’ or ‘register for the new service before everyone else.’ A sense of urgency, the promise of free benefits, and the exclusivity of the offer become the main tools of manipulation and psychological pressure,” said Fedor Chunizhekov, head of the research group at Positive Technologies.
The main goal of such attacks is to trick people into voluntarily granting attackers access to their crypto wallets. To do this, users are asked to log in via a messaging app, enter their seed phrase, or confirm a transaction, after which their digital assets fall under the control of the criminals.
Igor Bederov, founder of the company “Internet-Rozysk,” told the newspaper that the number of phishing domains containing the words “gram,” “wallet,” “convert,” and “gift” in conjunction with mentions of Telegram has increased tenfold in recent days. The attackers set up chains that sequentially direct users from search results to a Telegram channel, then to a bot, and finally to a fake website, in order to convince them that they are interacting with official services, the newspaper reports.
Gram is the former TON
Gram was created by Pavel Durov and the Telegram team in 2018–2019 as part of the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain project. However, in 2020, following a legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Durov publicly abandoned further development of the platform. In June 2026, Pavel Durov announced that the successful TON cryptocurrency would revert to its original name: the network’s native token was renamed Gram.
