Exactly as a bitcoin newbie if you are not very careful you would get scam by Telegram fraudsters who operate in ring, of course they offered outrageous rate, that is one of the Red flag unfortunately due to greediness many newbies felled into their trap, I mean exchanging bitcoin to fiat transacting via telegram, one of scammers would serves as escrow while thinking that you are dealing with real traders once you sent your coin you would be outrightly blocked and kicked out, those are the scammers and fraudsters who paint bitcoin in a bad light, however there are a lot of bright side in adopting bitcoin particular as a means of investment, transaction purposes, hodling as savings in a wallet instead of saving fiat in a bank, etc I believe all those good features outweighed purpose by which scammers utilized bitcoin to defraud people.

No, it's not normal for a newbie to get scammed in this current Bitcoin season, especially when BTC has reached trillion cap, because we're no longer in the years when people hardly get the right information needed to understand how to use BTC.
Why do i believe it's not normal?
Research shows newbies got scammed due to their inexperience, strong emotions, and social engineering. So, any newbies who took the time to have needed experience on how social engineering is used to scam, how to successfully use a wallet, not be greedy, and also avoid human error while also understanding how scammers operate won't see getting scammed as a normal thing.

I was reading a report on the other forum that, the fact cryptocurrency is used for money laundering is true, but the fact that the most cases reported of them in crypto so far on the interent might be true but why is that's because of the transparency I would answer. The fact that the most of the recoveries of such cases happened in the crypto, why? because of transparency.

So brother, crypto might be used for ML, I am saying crypto that includes everything, but BTC is not even used for ML as ETH is used, you must read what hackers are preferring in the last 6 months hacks, they always converted the stablecoins and other coins into ETH and used some mixers to do their obfuscation but still gets caught.

The transparerncy has made it possible, even after using the mixer the transaction stays onchain, but cash is not on chain and no one can trace it unless they are given some resources from the inside of the system. Most of the ML cases are kept secret and only made public when they think now it won't cause any harm to the leaders or the person with power.

And not only you have to mention fiat to argument that Bitcoin is not the only means for it, but among cryptocurrencies Monero and Zcash would be much more suitable for it than our pseudonymous Bitcoin. It is true that this pseudonymous nature does not prevent it from being used for such purposes, but why complicate when criminals can use other cryptos originally designed to maintain anonymity?

As for Telegram, just like you, I've pretty much stopped using it, and if it weren't for the notification bot I'd probably uninstall it...