Member-only story
How Facebook and Telegram Are Destroying Businesses
Facebook deleted my work, ignored a scammer using my old page address, and accused me of impersonating my own project. Telegram stole my project’s username and is trying to sell it back to me.
Originally published at https://reverseeverything.com on September 10, 2026.
I’ve been building software since 2008, making projects that people find useful and enjoy using. In 2013, I started my first public open source project, Qt Bitcoin Trader. I hosted it on SourceForge because I couldn’t afford a domain name.
The app became popular quickly, and scammers noticed. They registered a .com domain with the same name as my app and put malware there. Someone looking for my software could download the malware thinking it was my app.
The code was public, so anyone could change it and release their own version. I wanted users to know which downloads really came from me.
I got the domain taken down by reporting it for phishing. I still don’t know how many people were affected. That really upset me. People were looking for my software, and they might have ended up with malware instead. I didn’t want that to happen again.
One year later I took control of that domain and kept it reserved for Qt Bitcoin Trader to protect my users from scammers.
