By Opeyemi Quadri 
Monad’s co-founder, Keone Hon, has cautioned users to stay alert after scammers planted fake Telegram ads mimicking the blockchain project’s official claim portal.
The malicious campaign surfaced inside Monad’s official Telegram announcement channel, a space usually reserved for verified project updates. Hon said the attackers bought ad placements that appeared as legitimate posts, tricking users into clicking phishing links.
“Crazy that Telegram will push content directly into a channel that otherwise only contains content from one party,” Hon wrote on X, expressing frustration over the intrusion.
The scam emerged just days before Monad’s highly anticipated airdrop claim portal, set to open at 1:00 p.m. UTC on Tuesday. With the heightened attention surrounding the event, scammers appear to be exploiting investor excitement to lure victims.
Hon urged the community not to rush into any actions and to verify every link carefully.
“Do not act with urgency, and always triple-verify before doing anything,” he advised, adding that the portal will remain open for three weeks, eliminating any need for haste.
Meanwhile, the yet-to-launch MON token is already generating buzz in the market. It is trading on Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures around $0.07, giving it an implied $7 billion fully diluted valuation based on a total supply of 100 billion tokens. The pricing underscores rising anticipation for Monad’s mainnet debut and its ambition to rival other high-performance blockchains.
Monad, a Layer-1 network designed to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), touts scalability of up to 10,000 transactions per second and near-instant finality. Its team claims to have cracked the “blockchain trilemma” by balancing scalability, security, and decentralization through parallel execution and optimized consensus.
However, the infiltration of fake ads highlights a major weakness in Telegram’s ad review system. Despite the platform’s strict policies against deceptive content, phishing, and harmful financial promotions, the fraudulent ads slipped through.
Telegram’s guidelines explicitly ban phishing attempts, stating that “ads must not promote phishing, including services that trick a user into providing personal or other information.”
While the platform maintains robust ad rules on paper, the Monad case exposes an urgent need for stronger ad vetting and verification mechanisms to protect crypto users from evolving phishing threats.
Editorial Staff 
Dorcas Opeyemi