I am still curious to know: why do people buy usernames? I have read about something similar to this before, but I couldn't wrap my head around why anyone would have to pay such a huge amount of money for a username. Could it be to buy the identity of the original owner of the name and use it to scam people or for any other reason best known to them?
One of the reasons why usernames are being sold is because some companies usually need it for their - let’s say I create a telegram account and used @chickenchops as my username and then a company comes up some time later with the same name and they have a very huge presence online - they may decide to use that same username for their business but since it’s already in use they might reach out to the person who owns the account for them to buy it; but not for that price the scammer in the OP mentioned.