Layer-1 blockchain Monad’s community is on alert after its Co-Founder Keone Hon warned that scammers had managed to sneak fake ads into the project’s official Telegram announcements channel, just before its first major token airdrop.
Hon took to X to raise the issue, saying attackers had purchased Telegram-sponsored ads that appeared inside Monad’s verified announcement feed, a space usually reserved for official project updates. The warning comes shortly before Monad’s airdrop, set to begin at 1:00 pm UTC on Tuesday.
“Crazy that Telegram will push content directly into a channel that otherwise only contains content from one party,” Hon wrote, warning users that such ads could easily be mistaken for legitimate posts.
“Always triple-verify”
The fraudulent ads reportedly contained links mimicking Monad’s upcoming claim portal. Hon urged users to ignore any advertisements and to avoid clicking on links that appear within Telegram’s ad placements.
The fake ads contained links imitating Monad’s upcoming claim portal. Hon urged users not to click on any ads or suspicious links and stressed that there’s no urgency to act. “Do not act with urgency, and always triple-verify before doing anything,” he said, adding that the only valid claim site is ‘claim.monad.xyz,’ which will remain open for three weeks.
Scammers appear to be exploiting the surge of user attention before the airdrop goes live, attempting to trick participants into visiting phishing sites.
Despite the warning, interest in Monad seems strong. The yet-to-launch MON token is already trading on Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures market at around $0.07, suggesting a $7 billion fully diluted valuation.
Monad, which is building a Layer-1 blockchain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), says its design focuses on improving scalability and speed through parallel execution, reportedly reaching up to 10,000 transactions per second.
The incident has also put Telegram’s ad system under fresh scrutiny. Even with strict rules against deceptive promotions, the platform appears to have missed its own safeguards this time. The fake Monad ads broke Telegram’s policies banning phishing, spam, and misleading financial content, highlighting a gap between policy and enforcement.
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