Do you understand that companies and people build "fake social proof" these days. Those 120k members can easily be collected. You either go and buy lots of fake accounts to join your group or you go the free route and that is to join every other crypto related telegram group and then invite every single people to your group. Most likely more than half of these people will stay causing your group to look legit by numbers. With bounties you need to know not to trust this social proof as when you look twitter for instance, there you will get massive retweets and likes with no comments that are meaningful etc.
It is good however that whenever you are not certain to ask like you did.
Well, if a project is started with those fake members, I myself will be as best as possible to avoid those kind of thing, cause from the start it already trying to cheat on people.