Fragment the username market place among many other things are something scammers are directly targeting. A lot of new users are purchasing usernames for the first time and may not really be aware of how things work in the crypto world. This is essentially what scammers are trying to take advantage of.
The middleman scam
The fragment middleman scam is the same scam as any other trading market places middleman scam. The scammer creates a problem saying he cannot go through fragment because he is in USA and he is blocked, yada yada yada. He then conveniently offers you a solution which is his own middleman service. He will then show reviews of people who have used his service and if you check all the logs and reviews, you will see it to be flawless if it is a good scammer, careless scammers will overlook this and there will be flaws.
Ive gotton tired of responding to these messages over and over again, they all follow the same script of saying they cannot use fragment and they have a middleman service. These are all scammers. If you genuinely want to buy a username, all my usernames that I am selling are on getgems
Generally the only tip you need here is to never do this. because you transfering your NFT username to a middleman you just knew is essentially nothing different from sending it to the scammer. The scammer tricks you to think that the middleman is trustable because he has reviews, unfortunately, looking at this from the base level, you are transfering an NFT username to a third party you have no idea about. This is a big no no. (just use fragment!)
The fake fragment Bot user scam
The scammer creates a fake telegram account that impersonates the official fragment user. He will then send you something that seems to be an automated message like the ones you get from fragment. These will lead to an actual bot that opens a miniapp to a fake phishing page, and from there he could be doing various things and you will never know its not the real fragment due to the way telegram has setup mini apps. (you wont see the url)
I was very familiar with middleman scams as I was an active steam trader, but this was a new one for me. I was very close to falling for this one, but the scammer was careless in his aproach for several reasons.
- I had @addtostory on auction and he cannot send an offer in that case
- I use the fragmentbot for countless alerts and notifications and his bot shows no history
- He had a capital I in the bot, (I am someone who pays attention to detail in everything I do, so I just stopped myself rightaway at that point)
I will be adding more as I experience more and more. Im currently recieving so many messages to scam me out of my usernames, im currently placing every account that contacts me to buy my usernames into monitoring and I will be reporting them individually to telegram. Hopefully the events in France has improved the moderation efforts of telegram.