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Comment by HelixEndeavor | Hacker News Reader

Fragment? You mean Telegram's attempt to cash in on the cryptocoin scam, with their own walled-garden system and marketplace where it's currently hovering around $30 to buy a number, when it's genuinely cheaper to just get a Google Voice number or some prepaid burner phone number? Fragment, the service that is currently banned in the USA for being such an obvious scam?

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Is it only $30?

I just looked and all of the "ending soon" auctions have prices of $150 and up. With several of them at $4,000 and more. I know nothing about Fragment but I can only assume there's some kind of money laundering or other illegal activity involved to justify those prices.

> With several of them at $4,000 and more ... to justify those prices.

Those are nice looking ones. Some people spent great amounts of money to buy a nice phone number or a car plate (at least in Russia or Armenia for example).

A car plate\registration number like M888MM 777 will cost you 10M rubles ~122k USD.

It's just a crypto token exchange. Moreover, phone numbers it sells aren't "real", these are NFTs of phone numbers, nothing more. You can't use them for calls or anything else, there's no network service, the only purpose is Telegram authentication with an associated token.

Elaborate cryptocoin scam (I guess you are anti-crypto), buying with Fragment is anonymous and easier than Google Voice. I agree on being banned on U.S.A, blame that to bad crypto regulations.

They sell cosmetic services for their app I wonder how that classifies as scam? It's also a market so user sell to each other, is that scam too?

Wondering if the big players' app stores qualify as a scam under these terms, or if it is just more HN crypto-hate?

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