Bitcoin Forum

Recently I have found two ICO with fake team.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4467496.0

Bounty manager's are too careless about scam ICO. Even they didn't minimum research. We know we can't prevent scam but it's possible to save forum members to promote scam ICO. So time and money both will save.

I think those are bounty manager they have some experience about ICO. What is the reasons for not well research? They are using fake team from Google. It's very easy to find. Simply search on Google and get help from some website.

Bounty manager's geeting payment by eth or btc. They don't have loss. But what about participant who had joined their bounty if scam ICO? They spend time on bounty.

Some manager's might be well and research. But most of manager careless.

I will request to all bounty manager's please try to research minimum to save forum members.

The only reason I can think is that some managers are paid daily/weekly with real btc/eth and if this is true there is no point for them to report a scam even if they find it since they will get money anyway.

NOTE: This is a personal supposition, I don't know how they are paid.

It’s back to the accounts that participate in those campaigns. If they do a reasonable search before joining in any campaign, will reduce the risk significantly.
The primary purpose of campaign managers is profit "They do not run campaigns for charity" if they paid why tire themselves by checking ICOs.
If participants refuse to join campaigns, then campaign managers are better chosen and then reduce scam.

Of course they are paid. But i think the reason behind this is it's because  they're being greedy to some extent.

Btw, i think impressio's a scam too.

May i ask how you got the identity of those? How you verified their identity and how you think that they're a bunch of fakes? Is it just pure intuition?

That is inevitable. Everyone here would want to make a profit and include a bounty manager. But I am sure there are managers who do analyze the project that they will manage. Usually the manager is qualified and they also actively participate in an ICO. So they do management on ICO and at the same time invest. I prefer that because every participant who follows the bounty will get a sense of comfort and the risk of not being paid is very small.

There's a huge hole on the system of managing bounties..

I ask some BMs how they receive the payment from the devs team, so they're being paid per month managing the bounty. (Definitely if someone wants to hire them, they (boounty managers) will suggest a monthly payment to handle a bounty 'cause y'all know that it's really hard to manage a bounty with huge participants, and definitely they also want to secure the payment  ::).)

Then if many people found out that the project is a scam, bounty managers has an escape route to that cases.

1. releasing a statement that the project is a scam and he/she will look for sympathy to the other bounty hunters.
               (confusing the other participants that he/she is also a victim of the scam project even it's not.)

2. Being an innocent child after the incident and stating that he/she didn't receive the payment (even he/she receives monthly payment).

That's why bounty managers should face the accusation 'cause he accepted and presented the project here in forum. Well, it's kind'a unfair for those participants and investors who truly supports the project.

Going by this anyone proven to be doing this should be negged to oblivion. They are purposely not telling the community and potential investors that it's a scam for their own personal gain. If you see anyone doing this then send this information to some default trust members and see what they think.

Having been in charge of a few campaigns, and having talked with the "managers" that are involved in the cases cited here, I have to say, this is wrong, at least for those incidents I am aware of.
Managers usually get paid once they complete their work (which is either at the end of a round when a payment is made, or at the complete end of the campaign). Neither of the managers in these cases saw any money.
ughh123 themselves admitted that they have been scammed (not paid for their managing) in not only the TQ campaign, but also at least two campaigns before that.

The way I see it is that a lot of super inexperienced people are looking to find their way into management positions, without really knowing what it means, what they should be doing, and what the risks are.
By making theses steps, they do not only take an uncalculated risk themselves, they also put others at risk (the people joining the bounty, trusting the manager).
And I'm not saying that new people shouldn't start managing campaigns, we all have been inexperienced at some point. But they should take more time to educate themselves and research, before they take onto positions.

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Although one example of a situation like the one described in your post comes to mind, the aTriz incident (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2751956.msg34022229#msg34022229).
I would however hope this is an exception and not all managers are acting like this.

These managers are being lazy. Not checking the credibility of the project. The only thing in their mind was to make a profit out of the project in addition to their inexperience which put risk for everyone joining the campaign.

I agree, and I don't think a DT negative would even be a motivating factor, as some of these bounty managers are low-ranked members who could easily create another account and start the whole thing over again.  You'll recall that what aTriz did got him a bunch of red trust, which basically forced him to abandon that account.  That had an effect--that was a fairly well-established account that's now ruined.  If a Jr. Member pulls the same shit and gets a neg, do you think that person cares?  Likely not.

There ought to be a lot of things changed about the way managers run these bounties, and it'd be nice if there was a rank requirement for doing so.  Managers put their reputations on the line right along with the project developers, and like it or not they're basically vouching for the project.  They ought to have some sort of reputation to begin with to be able to run one of these bounties.

Its the reasons above why threads created in the altcoin announcements and bounties should be restricted to full members and above. There should probably be a restriction on those who can open campaigns on the services board too.

I wouldn't say most managers, but there's a lot of campaign managers who will help promote anything with little to no checks just as long as you pay them (especially if they've got little to no rep here). I would say this behaviour just comes down to both greed and inexperience which are both recipes for disaster.


Most are almost certainly paid a fixed amount every month or for an agreed specific term. I wouldn't trust any of these ICOs to pay me though and many wouldn't if the money wasn't in escrow (especially if their ICO went bad or not as expected). I certainly wouldn't work for them unless they paid me upfront or in fact escrowed the money because far too many would just disappear after they collected in their funds.


Anyone can buy a Full Member account or above, or just hire someone to do it for them and this is what usually happens.

In reality they don't give a fuck as long as they get paid.  I would say over 99 percent of people on this forum can be bought off with money.

yeah right i am newbie in bounty and i have bounty 10scam they not pay me 

Then how do we tackle this problem? We have newly created accounts opening campaign threads which even if they were to be negative trusted or banned they would just make a new account and start all over again.

At least if they bought an account they would then have to buy another one if they get negged. I think very few people would be willing to do this and once someone has invested in something they normally take a little bit more pride in it and it might encourage them to moderate their campaigns more.

Do you think that those fake future tellers that promise to bring back the person you lost or those people who sell 'magic' pills from all deciases to pensioners care much more about all those poor people who are going to be scammed, than those people who promote scam ICO? No. It's just business. Nothing is going to be changed.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to change things for the better. I do not think your example has much credibility too because future tellers are commonly called out to be immoral and scams. Unless they clearly state that its for a little fun but as soon as they go onto making promises and telling you are going to have misfortune its immoral.

We need a trusted user to create a central database of bounty managers.   Then, as a community, we distrust and harass those managers that do not register in the database.

The Bitcointalk forum is not the place for such databases/registries.  They should be third party.

Something like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4412712.0 ?

Shameless self-plug for BPIP? I'd be down to help creating/maintaining that, if you choose to host it on your site.

I checked that out and your proof is solely based on google images. Have you tried messaging them about the same? I mean what if they actually are in the same team and working remotely? How would you distinguish a legit linkedIn profile used in a scam ico from the original one?

First thing first, bounty participants are too careless when it comes to things like finding a legit ICO.If you are going to spend a few weeks/months advertising someone, you should at least take 10 minutes out of your copy-pasting life to check if they're promoting a legit company. Reputed bounty managers will do their homework but what if a bounty is managed by someone new to the forum? Their reputation/experience wouldn't count hence bounty participants shouldn't blindly advertise whatever they see.

That is because it's a very difficult task to find a ICO which is worth your investment. There is too many ICOs out there that are using underdog tactics like bumping topics using alt accounts that those are the ones which get the exposure. Unfortunately these are the ones which normally end up fetching a price because of the hype. They are also the ones which are most common to run away with the money after they dump their stakes themselves.

I think not only the managers, but also bumpers and low rankers that spam the thread just to be notice their scam campaigns. These were already discussed already, is there any action?

Either way, investors are being scammed over and over again because they are being permitted to post.

We should have an application of services before posting it on the Market place section. Or let our trusted Managers monopolize the forum just to make sure that there will be no scam campaigns that will be running in the forum.

Thanks OP for blowing the whistle against  potential scams. Bounty managers are supposed to be the first one to report the spam and smell the scam but look like 90% of them are not doing their work correctly.
Scam ICO is a big problem and scammers also become smarter to cover their tracks . Anybody can raise the voice and make  people aware.

I would love to see you as a bounty manager boss because it seems to me that you are a very reputable member in this forum and any project that you will handle in the future would all be legit. Just my thought.

How about a warning on all Altcoin boards, like the Securities (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=78.0) board:

Altcoins, ICOs and Forkcoins are created with only one goal: make the creator rich. And people have always joined them with one goal: get a share of that newly created wealth.
ICOs are just another step in a long line of money grabbers, and Tokens are even easier to create than setting up your own altcoin. And that's why a general warning on those boards would be good.

There is some action: users can now only delete their posts on certain boards after 24 hours. But that's not enough.
As bad as the spam is nowadays, I wouldn't be against a pay-per-post on those boards. A big spam thread easily reaches 5000 posts. I'd say that should cost at least $1000, say $0.20 per post. It could be paid by the thread starter, who opens a thread that allows up to 5000 posts, or by each participant, who can buy credit to post on the bounty/altcoin boards.
Or it may be easier to restrict those boards to Copper Members only. If they want to spam with 30 bumpbots, at least the forum earns something from it.

I think one problem of ICOs is that certain opinions from their respective community is being "moderated". Sadly "undesirable" comments or reviews toward the project  are removed to maintain its image as a good project. What's worse is that some analysts or big names are paid to make a good review. I was almost certain that scams would be the death of ICOs. That is until I saw Menlo One'd project. It aims to help the community by being a decentralized market place for ICOs. It's the first of its kind, so I am not yet certain if it's going to be 100% legit, but I can already see mass adoption within months given the integrity and efforts of its team. Check it out https://www.menlo.one

So far I haven't try yet joining bounty campaign without getting my payment thru my works, I guess bounty campaign should also follow the rules in signature campaign like, not allowing participant if they have neg. Trust, same with campaign manager cause I've notice that there are few campaign manager managing some campaign even if they have negative trust too, so to avoid scammer avoid joining bounty campaign if the campaign manager have negative trust vise versa with the members.

This is a good suggestion for all the bounty mangers in the house. A scam ICO promoted by a manager, can easily limit the level of trust bounty hunters or even investors have for such manager as they failed to do their due deligemce of proper research before promoting such ICOs. If mangers can do good research, this scam ICOs will be called out on time before they scam people of their money and resources.

That thread looks like a lot of work to maintain...

BPIP could take care of a lot of that work, but it would require someone to keep the list up to date.  I'll send you a PM.  :)

Bounty manager should research to save him/his time. But when we take part on bounty then we have to research our-self to prevent loss of ours time. And when a person invest on ico he/she should research about the ico. Bounty manager just check applications and task of the participant. So how it is possible by a bounty manager to make aware of the project. Even bounty manager does not have the role to post bounty thread. There are a lots of bounty where bounty poster and bounty manager are different person. Also many a project do not hire any bounty manager they manage that themselves. I think bounty manager has no responsibility to prevent or keep away forum members from a bounty.

It is a lot of work, but I don't mind maintaining it.

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Central database isn't good. There are more than a few drawbacks to it.

I just read one bounty manager writing abount weekly payment, can be an isolate case but if is the common pratice this explain a lot.

http://archive.is/2fgAJ#selection-4301.92-4301.167

Yes, it's true that manager's should have undergone proper research prior to accepting a particular project as a way of helping hunters not to be scammed. What we do is just to hope that all managers are like that but unfortunately, it's not always the case that is why the decision is still in our hands whether to participate or not.

This is just basically my opinion and it is not intended to hurt or offend someone.

If those Fake ICO's were posted on the forum then basically it gets the attention of the bounty managers. If we can just indentify directly if the certain ICO are too shady then we can prevent the problem. If that certain ICOS will not be posted or filtered in the first place. Cause basically some or most of the bounty managers for Ico doesn't or will not care at all anyways.

Tho if we can provide a list for all the bounty managers who are actively fighting scam  coins then i might be able to help on the dev process

This thread is informative.  It would be good to extend the list to include other managers running non anti-spam campaigns.

I have been thinking that it would be helpful to list their history of previously managed campaigns and to clarify how many percentages they did the job correctly or were scammed.  Some bounty managers, including most of them listed the above thread, has already disclosed their history by themselves, which I think is very nice, but not all of other bounty managers do this.  When I was looking at campaigns managed by a bounty manager, some of them were scam but the bounty thread was simply locked by him.  Not only does it block for the participants of that campaign to say anything more but also it seems to prevent participants of new campaign managed by him to aware of the previous scam.  The list would be helpful for participants, and also encourage bounty managers to research by themselves to avoid managing scam campaigns.