The influx of new accounts looking for your telegram handle has been crazy. But now I learned a trick. When they send you a PM and request the handle, you just answer them something like "I'm busy, let me get back to you in a week".
The mods are usually good at spotting scammers before anyone else, so you just need to wait for a week and go back to your inbox to check up on them, and if the profile has been banned, you know that you skipped a bullet.