GCR

Recently in China, there have been a rise in a number of fake customer service representatives pretending to be employees of Huobi, OKEx and Binance.

“Hi there, I am a customer service rep for Binance/Huobi/OKEx. Are you interested in digital currency investments? ”

Recently, many users in the China crypto circle have reported receiving a lot of calls from individuals claiming that they are with the exchange, and even from crypto media companies, pushing individuals to purchase cryptocurrencies.

Their process works something like this: “First these individuals pull you into a Wechat group, and then in there, there are these so-called teachers. Then they’ll pull you to some small exchanges to have you invest in some shitcoins.”

Below is an example of such group per Jinse, a Chinese media company.

The purpose of these Wechat groups: pull participants to join the coin speculation frenzy. These WeChat communities on a daily basis would share a briefing on the markets, hot news, and speculation strategy. They also conduct live broadcasts with the teachers or supposedly “influential” individuals to discuss certain tokens.

Some investigators attempted to ask for employment proof from these Wechat group organizers and they were being told that it wasn’t neceessary. Eventually, these individuals who kept asking questions got kicked out from the Wechat group.

The exchange OKEx has also discovered these issues. They found that these scammers disguise as OKEx’s customer service, and pulls individuals into a group, and send a market analysis every day. They then guide the users to pay.

Currently, the primary way to get sought out by these fraudsters is through one’s Wechat, which is mainly accessible through individuals’ phone number. But how did these fraudsters get the phone numbers?

He Yi, co-founder of Binance, said recently, “There are a lot of recent fraudulent individuals pretending to be Binance, Huobi, OKex and Bitmain. The best way to identify information leaks is to register a separate phone number with each platform.”

In response to such large-scale phone leaks, some users have speculated that the hackers have been stealing data from third-party SMS service providers or intercepting SMS verification codes. The investigation is still ongoing.