How Do I Know If a Crypto Project Is a Scam?
Most people who ask this question are already a little suspicious. Someone sent a link. A token is trending in a group chat. A friendly stranger has been messaging for three weeks and has now mentioned a platform with very good numbers. You want a way to check before the money leaves your account.
Here is the honest starting point. You cannot prove that a crypto project is safe. Nobody can, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What you can do is run a short set of checks that remove the large majority of scams in about twenty minutes, and then treat any project that fails even one of them as a no. There are thousands of tokens. Skipping a bad one costs you nothing.
The short answer: a crypto project is very likely a scam if it promises fixed or guaranteed returns, if the team cannot be verified anywhere outside the project’s own website, if the platform is not licensed in any market whose register you can search, if the token contract and its liquidity are hidden or unverified, or if you are being pushed to decide quickly. One of these on its own is a reason to slow down. Two together is a reason to stop.
Why this is harder than it was two years ago
The scale is worth understanding, because it explains why the pitches you see are so polished now.
In 2025, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 181,565 complaints that involved cryptocurrency, with reported losses of more than $11.3 billion, up 22% on the previous year, according to its 2025 annual report. Those are only the cases people reported.
Looking at the same problem from the blockchain side, Chainalysis estimated at least $14 billion flowed into scam addresses during 2025 and expects the final number to pass $17 billion as more addresses are identified. Its research also found that scam operations with links to AI tools extracted around 4.5 times more money per operation than those without.
That last point matters more than the totals. The old advice was to look for bad English, ugly websites and obvious stock photos. Those tells are disappearing. Websites, whitepapers, headshots, video testimonials and support chats can all be produced cheaply and convincingly now. So the checks below deliberately avoid judging polish. They look at things that are expensive or impossible for a scammer to fake: a licence on a public register, a verified contract on a public blockchain, a work history that existed before the token did, and the ability to actually send your money back.
Eight checks, in the order that saves you the most time
Work through these in order. Each one is faster than the one after it, so most projects fail early and you never need to reach the technical steps.
1. Start with the promise, not the technology
Before you look at the product, read what the project promises about money.
Any fixed return, any monthly percentage, any phrase built around the words guaranteed, risk free, capital protected or assured profit, puts the project in the fraud category regardless of how good the rest of it looks. The SEC treats promises of high returns with little or no risk as a classic warning sign of investment fraud, alongside sellers who are not licensed or registered anywhere.
The reason is simple. Nobody knows what Bitcoin will do next month. A real business cannot promise a fixed crypto return without either taking the risk itself, which is very expensive, or paying early users with money from later users, which is a Ponzi structure and eventually collapses. A legitimate project talks about what it is building and what could go wrong with it. It does not quote you a yield like a bank deposit.
This single check removes a large share of what gets pushed in Telegram and WhatsApp groups.
2. Check whether the people exist outside the project’s own website
Take the two or three names the project features most and look for them everywhere except the project’s own pages.
What you want to find is a history that existed before this token did. Old conference talks, a GitHub account with years of commits, a company registration, press coverage from a previous role, a LinkedIn profile with connections and a timeline that goes back further than a few months. What you are looking for is continuity, not prestige.
Warning signs worth acting on:
- Profiles across the team created in the same few weeks
- Headshots that appear elsewhere when you run them through a reverse image search
- Claimed jobs at well known companies that produce no independent trace
- A founder’s only footprint anywhere online is this project
- Advisors and partners named on the site who have never mentioned the project themselves
Anonymous teams are not automatically fraudulent. Some serious protocols were built by pseudonymous developers. But anonymity removes the only real consequence a founder faces for taking your money, so for a beginner it should move a project from “maybe” to “not with my money”.
3. Check whether the platform is licensed where you live
This is the check almost every article skips, and it is the most powerful one available to you, because licence registers are public and cannot be faked.
If you are in Dubai, the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority publishes a public register of licensed virtual asset service providers covering exchanges, brokers, custodians and advisory firms in the emirate. You can search it in a minute. If a platform is asking UAE residents for deposits and does not appear there, ask why. Note that some entries hold in-principle approval rather than a full licence, which is a conditional stage in the process, not the finished thing.
For anyone dealing with a firm or individual that claims to be regulated in the United States, Investor.gov has a free search tool for the licence and registration status of investment professionals and firms.
Two rules make this check reliable:
- Reach the register yourself. Type the regulator’s address into your browser. Never follow a licence link sent to you, and never trust a screenshot or a PDF certificate. Fake licence pages are cheap to build.
- Match the exact legal name, not the brand. Scam platforms often borrow the name of a licensed company or use a similar one. Check the legal entity, the licence number and whether the licence actually covers the activity being offered to you.
A platform being licensed does not make an investment good. It means there is a real company, in a real jurisdiction, that can be complained about. When something goes wrong, that difference is everything.
4. Look at the token on a block explorer
If the project has its own token, its blockchain record is public. You do not need to read code to get value from this step.
Open a block explorer for the relevant chain, such as Etherscan for Ethereum or Solscan for Solana, and paste in the token’s contract address. Take the address from the project’s official site or a major listing service, not from a chat message, because fake tokens copying a real name are a standard trick.
Then look for four things:
- Is the contract verified? Verification means the developer published the source code and the explorer confirmed that the published code matches the bytecode actually deployed on chain. An unverified contract on a token asking for public money means you are being asked to trust something nobody can inspect.
- How are the holdings spread? The holders tab shows the largest wallets. If a handful of addresses control most of the supply, those holders can crash the price whenever they choose, and the chart you were shown means nothing.
- Is the liquidity locked? On a decentralised exchange, liquidity is what makes a token sellable. If the team can withdraw it at any moment, they can leave you holding something with no buyer. That is the mechanism behind a rug pull.
- Does the contract let the owner change the rules? Functions that let an owner mint unlimited new tokens, freeze transfers or block selling are the difference between a risky investment and a trap. Many wallets now flag suspicious permissions before you approve a transaction, and it is worth reading those prompts instead of clicking through.
If reading a holders tab feels beyond you right now, that is a fair reason to stay out of individual small-cap tokens entirely. Nobody is obliged to play in the part of the market where the checks require technical work.
5. Ask where the return is supposed to come from
Say out loud, in one sentence, how this project is supposed to make money. Not how you make money. How the business does.
Real answers are boring and specific. It charges a fee on trades. It lends assets and keeps a spread. It sells software. It earns rewards for validating a network. You may disagree about whether the plan will work, but you can describe it.
Scam answers are vague and circular. Proprietary trading technology. An arbitrage system. AI-driven strategies that cannot be explained for competitive reasons. Rewards for recruiting new members. When the only visible source of money is new deposits, the structure only works while deposits keep growing, and the people who joined last always lose.
The FTC makes a blunt related point about the mechanics: crypto payments do not come with the legal protections that cards and bank transfers have, and there is usually no way to reverse a transaction or get funds back once it has been sent. That is why the check has to happen before you pay and not after.
6. Look at how they found you
The pitch is not always a project. Very often it is a person.
The CFTC’s advisory on online financial romance and grooming fraud describes a pattern that now accounts for enormous losses. A stranger reaches you through a dating app, a social platform, or a wrong-number text. They are warm, consistent and in no hurry. They want to move the conversation to a private messaging app. They can never meet in person. They mention their own success in crypto or currency trading, sometimes an uncle or contact with inside information. Weeks later, they introduce a platform.
The mechanics are worth naming clearly, because recognising the shape of it is what breaks the spell:
- Unsolicited contact that becomes personal before it becomes financial
- Conversation moved quickly to WhatsApp, Telegram or a similar app
- Screenshots of their own profits used as encouragement
- A platform you have never heard of, reached through a link they send you
- Small withdrawal early on that works perfectly, which builds trust before the larger deposits
- Pressure that arrives dressed as concern for you and your family
No legitimate investment ever needs to reach you through a private relationship with a stranger. If the source of an opportunity is a person you have never met in the physical world, that alone is enough to decline.
7. Try to take money out
If you already have funds on a platform you are unsure about, request a withdrawal now, for a modest amount, before you add anything else.
The single most reliable sign of a fake platform is this: the dashboard shows healthy profits, but the money will not come out. Instead you are told there is a tax to settle first, a verification fee, a liquidity charge, an anti-money-laundering deposit, or an upgrade required to unlock your tier. Sometimes an early small withdrawal succeeds and the blocking only starts once your balance is large.
Treat any request to pay money in order to release money as confirmation. Do not pay it. Paying it does not free the balance, because the balance is a number on a web page rather than assets that exist.
There is a second wave that follows. The FBI’s complaint centre has documented a growing pattern of fake law firms, recovery agents and even people impersonating government officials who contact victims and offer to get the lost funds back for an upfront fee. Anyone who approaches you unprompted offering recovery is running the same scam a second time.
8. Read what people outside the project say
Only now is it worth searching. Put the project name next to the words scam, complaint and review, and look specifically for withdrawal problems rather than price complaints. People angry that a token fell are describing a bad investment. People saying they cannot get their money out are describing something else.
Then read the project’s own public channel for ten minutes without posting. Real communities contain technical argument, unanswered questions, criticism and dissatisfied users. Channels where every message is positive, where doubt disappears within seconds, and where questions are met with encouragement to buy more are being managed rather than moderated.
Be careful with the absence of results too. A project with no independent coverage at all is not thereby clean. It might simply be new enough that nobody has been hurt yet.
Scam, or just a bad project?
These two things need separating, because they call for different decisions and most guides blur them together.
A scam is designed to take your money. There is no product and no intention to deliver one. The checks above are built to catch it.
A bad project is real. The team exists, the code works, the licence may even be genuine. It is just very likely to fail, because the idea is weak, the token has no actual use, the competition is better funded, or the price already assumes a future that is not going to arrive. You can lose everything here too, and no amount of contract-reading will protect you, because nothing is hidden. The project is simply not worth what it costs.
This distinction is also where a useful question replaces an unanswerable one. “Is this project a scam” has a yes or no answer you can investigate. “Will this project succeed” does not. Which is why the amount you invest matters more than the verdict you reach. Position sizing protects you from the projects that are real and still go to zero, and there are far more of those than there are outright frauds.
The short version you can screenshot
| Red flag | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Guaranteed or fixed returns | No real crypto business can promise this. Regulators treat it as a primary fraud marker. |
| Team with no history before the token | Removes the only real consequence for taking your money. |
| Not on any licence register you can search | Nobody to complain to and no legal entity behind the platform. |
| Unverified contract, or supply held in a few wallets | The code cannot be inspected, or a few holders control the price. |
| Unlocked liquidity | The team can remove the ability to sell at any moment. |
| No explainable source of return | Usually means the return comes from later deposits. |
| Reached you through a stranger’s private message | The documented shape of financial grooming fraud. |
| Withdrawal blocked until you pay a fee | The clearest confirmation available that the platform is fake. |
| Urgency, countdowns, limited spots | Pressure exists to stop you completing exactly these checks. |
What to do if you have already sent money
If the checks arrived too late, the useful moves are narrow but real.
Stop sending money immediately, including fees. Whatever release charge you have been quoted, paying it will not return your balance. This is the hardest step, because the sunk cost makes another payment feel like the way out.
Save the evidence before it disappears. Screenshot the platform, the chat history, the profile, the website and every transaction confirmation. Record the wallet addresses you sent to and the transaction hashes. Scam sites go offline quickly, and chats get deleted from the other side.
Report it to the right places. In the United States, consumer fraud goes to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov and crypto-related crime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. In the UAE, report through your local police cybercrime channel, and if the platform claimed to be licensed, tell the regulator whose register you checked. Elsewhere, report to your national police cybercrime unit and financial regulator. Reporting rarely recovers funds, and it is still worth doing, because wallet addresses get flagged and freezing is occasionally possible when stablecoins are involved and the report is fast.
Tell your bank if fiat left through it. Once crypto has moved on chain it is generally gone, but the bank or card transfer that funded the purchase sometimes sits inside a window where something can be done.
Refuse every recovery offer that comes to you. Anyone who contacts you unprompted claiming they can retrieve your funds is running the follow-up scam described above. Legitimate help does not arrive by direct message.
Do not carry it alone. Losing money this way is not a sign of stupidity. These operations are run at industrial scale by teams whose full-time job is to be convincing, and their most common targets are careful people who were approached patiently.
The question underneath the question
“How do I know if this project is a scam” is usually standing in for something bigger: how do I take part in this market without being the person it happens to?
The answer has less to do with any single token than most people expect. It looks like this. Keep the great majority of your money in assets you can explain, and cap the speculative part at a number whose total loss would change nothing about your life. Buy through a platform you found yourself and verified on a register, not one that was sent to you. Understand who holds the asset and what happens if that company disappears. Accept slower, plainer returns as the price of not needing to be right about a token.
Those are not exciting rules, and they are the ones that keep people in the market long enough to benefit from it. If you would rather work through where crypto sits alongside everything else you own, that is what one-to-one investment consulting across US stocks, crypto and real estate is for. Investors who want the regulated side of the picture first often start with US stock market consulting for investors in the UAE, which covers account structure, withholding tax and portfolio design in detail.
My own view comes from three years working as a broker in Dubai and the clients I have advised since: the people who do well in crypto are almost never the ones who found the right coin. They are the ones who sized the position so that being wrong was survivable.
If you are looking at something right now and cannot decide, book a free first conversation and bring the link with you. A second opinion before you pay costs nothing. After you pay, it is usually too late to matter.
Frequently asked questions
Can I get my crypto back if I was scammed? Usually not. Crypto transactions are confirmed by a network rather than a bank, and the FTC notes that crypto payments lack the legal protections that cards and bank transfers carry, with no reliable route to reverse a transfer. Recovery happens occasionally, mostly when stablecoin issuers can freeze funds or law enforcement seizes a wallet early, which is why fast reporting is worth the effort even when the odds are poor.
Does an audit mean a crypto project is safe? No. An audit reviews the code for technical weaknesses at one point in time. It does not check whether the founders intend to keep their promises, whether the business model works, or whether the contract has been changed since. Scam projects also display fake audit badges, so if you see one, open the auditor’s own site and confirm the report exists there.
Is an anonymous team always a scam? No, but it removes your only real protection. If the founders are unidentifiable, no one can be held responsible when the money leaves. A few well-known protocols were built pseudonymously. For a beginner deciding where to put savings, anonymity is a good enough reason to pass.
How do I check whether a crypto exchange is licensed in Dubai? Search VARA’s public register of licensed virtual asset service providers. Reach it by typing the regulator’s address into your browser yourself, match the exact legal entity name rather than the brand, and check that the licence covers the service being offered to you. An in-principle approval is a conditional stage, not a full licence.
A platform shows my profits but wants a fee before I can withdraw. Is that normal? No. Regulated platforms deduct any charges from your balance. A demand for a new payment before funds can be released is the standard signature of a fake platform, and paying it will not release anything.
What is the fastest single check I can run? Read the promise. If a fixed or guaranteed return is being offered on a crypto investment, you are finished. No further research is needed.
Sources
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report (published April 2026)
- Chainalysis, 2026 Crypto Crime Report: Scams
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Digital Asset and “Crypto” Investment Scams investor alert
- Federal Trade Commission, What To Know About Cryptocurrency and Scams
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Six Warning Signs of Online Financial Romance Frauds
- Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (Dubai), Public Register
- Etherscan documentation, Contract Verification
This article is general education, not regulated financial, tax or legal advice. Figures on fraud losses are current as of September 2026.
E. FAQ (schema-ready)
Six questions are included in the article body above. All six are drawn from People Also Ask and community phrasing, and all are answered in the article rather than added as filler. Use these six in FAQPage schema:
- Can I get my crypto back if I was scammed?
- Does an audit mean a crypto project is safe?
- Is an anonymous team always a scam?
- How do I check whether a crypto exchange is licensed in Dubai?
- A platform shows my profits but wants a fee before I can withdraw. Is that normal?
- What is the fastest single check I can run?
F. INTERNAL LINKING
Link building summary
- Article topic: identifying fraudulent crypto projects and platforms
- Primary keyword: how to know if a crypto project is a scam
- Internal links added: 4
- External links added: 7
- Main page receiving internal authority: /services/
- Main topical cluster strengthened: Cryptocurrency, with a supporting bridge into US Stock Market
Internal link map
| # | Destination | Anchor text | Exact URL | Placement | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Services hub (crypto section) | one-to-one investment consulting across US stocks, crypto and real estate | https://annavasyutinainvestments.com/services/ | “The question underneath the question”, paragraph 3 | The reader has just been told the real protection is portfolio structure rather than token picking. This is the exact point where help with structure becomes the next thing they want. The services page is the only existing page covering crypto commercially, so it is also the correct authority recipient for a crypto article. |
| 2 | US Stock Market service page | US stock market consulting for investors in the UAE | https://annavasyutinainvestments.com/services/us-stock-market/ | “The question underneath the question”, paragraph 3, immediately after link 1 | A reader scared off a token is often looking for the regulated alternative. This page answers that specific need in depth and is the site’s strongest page, so the link is useful to the reader and builds the crypto-to-stocks cluster bridge. |
| 3 | About | three years working as a broker in Dubai and the clients I have advised since | https://annavasyutinainvestments.com/about/ | Same section, closing paragraph | The article makes an experience-based claim at this point, which is exactly where a reader asks who is saying this. Supports E-E-A-T on a YMYL page without a promotional detour. |
| 4 | Contact | book a free first conversation | https://annavasyutinainvestments.com/contact/ | Final paragraph before the FAQ | The reader has reached a genuine decision point with a specific project in hand. This is the only commercial call in the article and it arrives after the full value has been delivered. |
Anchor text notes
Four links, four different anchors, no repetition and no exact-match keyword stuffing. Anchors 1 and 2 are descriptive and partial-match, anchor 3 is entity and experience based, anchor 4 is natural language. No link sits in the introduction, none appear in FAQ answers, and the article reads normally with every hyperlink stripped out.
Links deliberately not used
- The Bitcoin beginner post. It is the closest topical match on the site and its URL currently 404s. Add the link as soon as the permalink issue is fixed, from check 4 or the closing section.
- The blog index. Adds nothing at any point in this article.
- The home page. Already reachable from the header and footer, and less relevant than /services/ at every point in the article.
G. EXTERNAL LINKING
| # | Source | Exact URL | Claim supported | Placement | Authority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report | https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf | 181,565 crypto-related complaints in 2025 with losses above $11.3 billion, up 22% year on year | “Why this is harder than it was two years ago”, paragraph 2 | Priority 1, US federal law enforcement, primary data |
| 2 | Chainalysis, 2026 Crypto Crime Report: Scams | https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/crypto-scams-2026/ | At least $14 billion in on-chain scam revenue in 2025, projected above $17 billion; AI-linked operations extract about 4.5 times more per operation | Same section, paragraph 3 | Priority 4, original on-chain research, the most cited dataset in this field |
| 3 | SEC Office of Investor Education and Advocacy investor alert | https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-alerts/digital-asset-and-crypto-investment-scams-investor-alert | Promises of high returns with little or no risk are a classic fraud warning sign; unlicensed and unregistered sellers are a core red flag | Check 1, paragraph 2 | Priority 1, US securities regulator |
| 4 | VARA (Dubai) Public Register | https://www.vara.ae/en/licenses-and-register/public-register/ | Dubai publishes a searchable register of licensed virtual asset service providers, including entries holding in-principle approval | Check 3, paragraph 2 | Priority 1, the licensing authority itself, correct jurisdiction for the UAE audience |
| 5 | Etherscan documentation, Contract Verification | https://docs.etherscan.io/contract-verification | Verification publishes the source code and confirms it matches the bytecode deployed on chain | Check 4, first bullet | Priority 2, official documentation of the tool the reader is being asked to use |
| 6 | FTC, What To Know About Cryptocurrency and Scams | https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-know-about-cryptocurrency-scams | Crypto payments lack the legal protections of cards and bank transfers, and transactions generally cannot be reversed | Check 5, final paragraph; referenced again without a second link in the FAQ | Priority 1, US consumer protection regulator |
| 7 | CFTC, Six Warning Signs of Online Financial Romance Frauds | https://www.cftc.gov/LearnAndProtect/AdvisoriesAndArticles/RomanceScam.html | The documented grooming pattern: unsolicited contact, a move to private messaging, inability to meet, claimed trading success, then an investment pitch | Check 6, paragraph 2 | Priority 1, US derivatives regulator, the agency that publishes this specific advisory |
Plus one functional reporting link, https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/, in the “already sent money” section. It is the official FTC reporting portal and is included as an action route rather than as evidence.
Source-to-claim confirmation: every source above was opened and read during research. No claim is attached to a source that does not state it. The IC3 figures come from the report itself rather than from news coverage of it. Where a source is referenced twice in the article, only the first mention is linked.
H. IMAGE SEO
| # | Concept | Filename | Alt text | Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Featured image: person at a laptop with a crypto project page open and a checklist beside it, calm and neutral, no logos or coin imagery | how-to-know-if-a-crypto-project-is-a-scam.jpg | Investor checking a crypto project against a verification checklist before investing | Top of article, below H1 |
| 2 | Simple diagram of the eight checks as a funnel from promise to community reputation | crypto-project-scam-checks-sequence.jpg | Diagram of eight checks for identifying a crypto scam, from the promise through to community reputation | Start of “Eight checks” section |
| 3 | Clean illustration of a licence register search screen showing a legal entity name and licence number, generic rather than a real screenshot | crypto-platform-licence-register-check.jpg | Searching a regulator licence register to confirm a crypto platform is licensed | Check 3 |
| 4 | Illustration of a block explorer token page with contract verification, holders and liquidity highlighted | token-contract-block-explorer-check.jpg | Block explorer token page showing contract verification and holder distribution | Check 4 |
| 5 | Red flag summary table styled as a shareable graphic | crypto-scam-red-flags-checklist.jpg | Checklist of nine crypto scam red flags including guaranteed returns and blocked withdrawals | “The short version you can screenshot” |
Compress to WebP where the theme allows, keep each under 150 KB, lazy load everything except image 1, and set explicit width and height to protect layout shift.
I. SCHEMA
Recommended, and nothing beyond this:
- BlogPosting — headline, description, datePublished, dateModified, image, mainEntityOfPage, wordCount
- Person as author, with Anna Vasyutina, jobTitle Investment Consultant, and sameAs pointing to the About page plus the Telegram, Instagram and YouTube profiles already listed on the site
- Organization as publisher, Anna Vasyutina Investments
- FAQPage — the six questions in section E, answers matching the on-page text word for word
- BreadcrumbList — Home → Blog → article
Do not add Review, AggregateRating, Product or HowTo. HowTo rich results were retired for this kind of content and the article is not a procedure with a single outcome.
J. FRESHNESS AND FACT CHECK
Current as of 13 September 2026.
Facts that will need review:
| Item | Review cadence | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| IC3 crypto complaint and loss figures | Annually, around March or April | The 2026 report will supersede these numbers. Update the sentence and the date reference together. |
| Chainalysis scam revenue estimate | Annually, plus one mid-year check | Chainalysis revises prior-year figures upward as addresses are identified. The $14 billion figure was already expected to pass $17 billion. |
| VARA register and licence stages | Every six months | New licences are issued regularly and the in-principle approval wording can change. Verify the register URL still resolves before each review. |
| Reporting channels | Annually | Government portals move. Re-check the FTC reporting address and any UAE channels named in future updates. |
| Block explorer interface details | Every six months | Tab names and layouts change. Keep the wording about tabs general enough to survive a redesign. |
YMYL handling: no returns are quoted, no platform is recommended, no token is named as safe or unsafe, and no regulatory claim is made without a link to the regulator that makes it. Anna’s credentials are used once, in the context where her Dubai experience is directly relevant. The closing disclaimer states plainly that this is education and not regulated advice, which matches the “what I do not do” framing already used on the US stock market page.
Deliberate omissions: no third-party scam-checking or token-scoring tool is recommended by name, because the quality of those services changes quickly and an endorsement would need re-verification on every review. No specific Dubai or Abu Dhabi police reporting URL is included, because those portals were only confirmable through secondary sources today. Verify the current official channel before adding one.