Admin Verification

Being able to verify you are talking to a legitimate Admin of a chat as a community member is important. Telegram over the years has been the prime target for impersonators scamming users into giving out personal information as well as even sending funds or giving out passwords. Often scammers will act as "support" or swap out letters of a persons name to make their profile appear to be that of an admin. They will then contact chat participants direct and offer their help, when infact they are trying to scam!

To combat such cases, modr8 offers "Admin Verification" functionality, where anyone can forward a message they have received from a user to your bot to confirm whether they are a legitimate admin or not.

How to use the Admin Verification system

1. Select any message received by any user

2. Select forward the message on

3. Type your bots username into the search

4. Your bot will respond to the message to notify whether the user is a known admin or not.

Example - A verified Admin

A message from an Admin forwarded to the chats Modr8 powered bot verifies the user

Example - A verified Owner

The owner of a bot sends a message, which is forwarded on to their bot and verified

Example - A fake Admin

A fake admin messages a user asking whether they need support

Forwarding their message to the Modr8 powered bot in the chat in private identifies they are not an admin. Scammer caught!

How can we inform our community that this functionality exists?

We often get asked what is the best method of letting communities know this option is available to them. Instead of trying to chase down all of these users and banning them, educating your community to verify is the best course of action. This can be done by:

• Inform users in the welcome message that they can forward a message to verify admins

• Set up a scheduled announcement that informs users the steps they can take every 12 hours

• Create a command in the bot which can be used by users/community managers to list the steps they can take

❓FAQ & Troubleshooting

I forwarded a message but the bot has said the users privacy is too high

This can happen - Telegram is a privacy concious platform and it does allow users to restrict their messages from being forwarded, but also the data contained in the profile. Under these circumstances it is beneficial for your community users to NOT trust these messages. A legitimate admin should have no issue with being visible.