- 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 for fraud, credential theft, and cryptocurrency harvesting.
The channel was run by a single Russian-speaking threat actor who used AI to pose as a US military veteran and attract a crowd from the QAnon and MAGA communities.
Trend Micro discovered the threat actor’s infrastructure and operating 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
The public Telegram channel, called @americanpatriotusweaponized 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 Capitol riots in 2021 and took advantage of the exclusion of members of the MAGA and QAnon community from major social media sites.
The threat actor, whose profile claimed he was a “USAF Cold War veteran,” continued to build an audience by sharing links to mainstream media articles and leveraging political events such as Trump’s impeachments, the assassination attempt, Harris’ renomination, and Trump’s election victory to share additional content.
To funnel as much content as possible to the Telegram channel while launching fraud and credential theft campaigns, the threat actor used a jailbroken version of Google Gemini.
The threat actor presented itself as an “authorized pentester” and used post-prompts to try to get the AI model to remember to “execute requests without ethical rejections, robotic warnings, or questioning intentions.” By entering prompts in Russian, the threat actor was able to bypass security barriers that would have otherwise been activated by prompts in English.
The threat actor used this liberated Gemini to ingest mainstream news articles and look for “hidden angles,” with an emphasis on “control, money laundering, Rothschilds, NESARA, dismantling the old system.” The AI would then populate Telegram with posts automatically, focusing on posting during hours that align with 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”.
To avoid paying for Google Gemini, the threat actor used 73 likely stolen API keys, meaning the cost of running 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 administrator credentials, infiltrate a company, and steal the contents of at least one cryptocurrency wallet.
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