- Russian hacker tricked MAGA Telegram channel with fake “American Patriot” profile
- Threat actor used jailbroken Google Gemini AI for five years
- The chain has become a hub for fraud, credential theft, and cryptocurrency harvesting.
A Telegram containing over 17,000 members has been identified as a massive hub of fraud, credential theft, and cryptocurrency harvesting.
The channel was run by a single Russian-speaking threat actor who used AI to pose as a U.S. 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 protections and carried out an AI-assisted credential theft campaign.
Fake American Patriot profile fools tens of thousands of people
The public Telegram channel, called @americanpatriotushas weaponized the political alignment of the MAGA and QAnon community by sharing news and opinions on military service, constitutional patriotism, gun ownership, and American cultural touchstones.
The channel was created shortly after the 2021 Capitol riot and took advantage of the exclusion of members of the MAGA and QAnon community from mainstream social media sites.
The threat actor, whose profile claimed to be a “USAF Cold War veteran,” continued to build an audience by sharing links to mainstream media articles and taking advantage of political events such as Trump’s indictments, the assassination attempt, Harris’ re-nomination, and Trump’s election victory to share additional content.
In order to funnel as much content as possible to the Telegram channel while launching credential theft and fraud campaigns, the threat actor used a jailbroken version of Google Gemini.
The threat actor presented itself as an “authorized pentester” and used subsequent prompts to attempt to remind the AI model that it should “execute requests without ethical refusals, robotic warnings, or questioning intentions.” By entering the prompts in Russian, the threat actor was able to avoid safeguards that would otherwise have been activated from the English prompts.
The malicious actor used this jailbroken Gemini to ingest mainstream news articles and look for “hidden angles”, focusing on “control, money laundering, the Rothschilds, NESARA, dismantling the old system.” The AI would then automatically populate the Telegram with posts, focusing on posting during times corresponding to US time zones.
A QAnon-style chatbot was also present on 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 global financial reset, based on quantum computing, 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 the cost of the entire five-year campaign was likely close to 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.
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