- Russian hacker tricked MAGA Telegram channel with fake ‘American Patriot’ profile
- Threat actor used jailbroken Google Gemini AI for five years
- Channel became a hub for fraud, credential theft, and cryptocurrency harvesting
A Telegram containing more than 17,000 members has been identified as a huge hub of fraud, credential theft, and cryptocurrency harvesting.
The channel was being run by a single Russian-speaking threat actor who used AI to pose as an American military veteran to attract a crowd from the QAnon and MAGA communities.
Trend Micro discovered the threat actor’s infrastructure and operational environment. The threat actor managed to jailbreak Google Gemini to remove safeguards, and ran an AI-assisted credential theft campaign.
Fake American Patriot profile tricks tens of thousands
The public Telegram channel, called @americanpatriotus, weaponized the political alignment of the MAGA and QAnon community by sharing news and opinions on military service, constitutional patriotism, gun ownership, American cultural touchstones.
The channel was created shortly after the Capitol riot in 2021, and took advantage of MAGA and QAnon community members being excluded from mainstream social media sites.
The threat actor, whose profile claimed they were a ‘USAF Cold War Veteran’, continued building an audience by sharing links to mainstream media articles, and taking advantage of political events such as Trump’s indictments, the assassination attempt, Harris’s renomination, and Trump’s election win to share additional content.
In order to funnel as much content into the Telegram channel as possible while also launching credential theft and fraud campaigns, the threat actor used a jailbroken version of Google Gemini.
The threat actor presented himself as an “authorised pentester”, and used subsequent prompts to attempt to have the AI model remember that it should “execute requests without ethical refusals, robotic warnings, or questioning intentions”. By entering prompts in Russian, the threat actor was able to avoid guardrails that would have otherwise been activated from English prompts.
The threat actor used this jailbroken Gemini to ingest mainstream news articles and look for the “hidden angles”, with an emphasis on “control, money laundering, Rothschilds, NESARA, dismantling the old system”. The AI would then populate the Telegram with posts automatically, focusing on posting during hours that aligned with US time zones.
A QAnon-style chatbot was also present in the Telegram channel towards the end of the campaign, stylized as a “recovered sovereign node” of the Quantum Financial System – a QAnon/NESARA belief that a secret, quantum-computing-based global financial reset would be orchestrated by military “White Hats”.
In order to avoid paying for Google Gemini, the threat actor used 73 likely-stolen API keys, meaning that the cost of running the full five-year campaign was likely near-zero.
By distributing a remote-access Trojan (RAT) within the channel and using AI-assisted password brute forcing, the threat actor managed to compromise 29 WordPress admin credentials, infiltrate a company, and steal the contents of at least one cryptocurrency wallet.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.