Two weeks ago I was in the waiting room for a medical appointment and I got a series of messages from Telegram from an account I didn’t recognize. Here’s the sequence:
- @OlivHi26
- Are you there?
- Joe Crawford
- What do you want and who are you?
- @OlivHi26
- Nice to meet You here. My name is Olivia from from Smartsites Digital Marketing Agency
- Our company has a new project and we are offering a great job opportunity that might interested you. can i share the job details and salary ?
- Can i continue?
- Joe Crawford
- Feel free to send me an email. Any place you’d have found my number should have my email as well.
- Thanks for your consideration.
- @OlivHi26
- Okay i will share the details here first for you to through and see if it interests you.
- This is an online project to help brands gain more popularity on YouTube. Your role is to subscribe Our client’s YouTube Channels and send screenshot to us once you complete your task, you’ll get paid immediately.
- You can easily earn between $150 to $450 per day in your free time. Payments can be made to any digital wallet you have, like MetaMask, CashApp or Coinbase etc.
- Is it clear?
After that, I did a little research about “Smartsites Digital Marketing Agency” and found this relevant page: An Important Recruitment Scam Notice from SmartSites:
I quoted this line to “Olivia Hill” (@OlivHi26)…
“SmartSites does not recruit via WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger. Legitimate job offers and communication will only come through email from the @smartsites.com domain.”
I asked for a comment on that line. Promptly, the entirety of my message history with “Olivia” disappeared. Had I not taken screenshots there would be no record of it at all.
Chat Screenshots
After I quoted the SmartSites warning page:
“SmartSites does not recruit via WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger. Legitimate job offers and communication will only come through email from the @smartsites.com domain.”
…the entire message string disappeared. Elmo helpfully telling me:
No messages here yet…
Send a message or tap on the greeting below.
The Profile, before and after the chat disappeared
Follow Up
Here’s what the chat looks like after the @OlivHi26 disappeared:
I understand Telegram disappearing messages sent by the scammer, I was surprised that none of my side of the conversation were preserved in the app. I’m glad I captured screenshots during our conversation though I wish I had grabbed screenshots of my quote of SmartSites. Kudos to SmartSites for making their warnings so public about how they communicate roles and that they’d never use an avenue like Telegram to reach out to folks.
