Bitcoin Forum

Recently, some projects refuse to pay bounty participants or change terms after the work is completed. Regardless of their excuse, this is considered fraudulent inducement and can be reported to the FBI or your local police wherever you are in the world.. You can file a report at this FBI website: https://www.ic3.gov/complaint/default.aspx/

Some projects will say they are registered overseas or have lawyers to scare  people from taking action. Even if so, International law make this a crime. The terms of the bounty announcements are considered a legal contract and must be followed under international law; even if NOT signed. So I recommend any bounty participants who have been cheated out of payment to contact your local police department or fill out the FBI Internet Fraud complaint form above. If you don’t take action, cheating bounties will become common.

I hope this will be of help to many...

This is still useless unless you know the real identities of the person behind the project. Most of the scam ICOs are using aliases and fake identities or even fake company that never exists in real world. The filing of cases needs real identities of individuals involve. Without legitimate information about the person or company scamming bounty participants, it's like chasing ghosts and FBI won't waste their precious time in doing those things. Don't worry, sooner or later those cyber criminals will rot in jail or even in hell for taking advantage of people's time, money and effort.

Don't waste your time :). FBI will not care about it and there are no way to find out scammers from scam ICO projects behind scam bounty campaigns cause they just picked a random picture of someone on Google then they put into their dev team with a good profile. LOL. Beside as I know cryptocurrency is not something legalized worldwide so I don't think there is any clearly law about it so FBI have nothing to do in this case :).

you cant stop it, maybe if you know them you can do some actions to stop them. but as long as their identity is hidden, we can't do anything about that.

honestly this is a complaint always found by bounty hunters, I think the participants never report it to the police and the report will be useless or time consuming, because we will not be responded by them.

Sorry but you’re very wrong about that. This opinion sounds like what the scam project would like u to think. I got a very different reply after filing my complaint; hence the post. Every project has left a trace of whose behind it somewhere; trademark registration, web address domain, etc. With a little ingenuity, they can be found. If that fails, there are many professional agencies that can find the information cheaper than you would believe.

That is incorrect; the police must respond to every crime report and investigate if it’s legitimate. Some years ago, one of my suppliers failed to deliver the product I ordered; I call the UK police from overseas and they went to the suppliers offices....the suppliers delivered the goods!!;-)

This is why you should only join bounties that are run by ranking members of the forum. If you stupidly join bounties that are run by newbie/jr.member throw-away accounts then expect your efforts to be thrown away as well. If you join bounties by high ranking members then you will probably be not disappointed because you can open a scam accusation against them and ruin their thousand dollar account value.

Simply don't participate in the copycat scam and shady project cryptocurrencies.

Unfortunately, bounty fraud is still basically impossible to stop.

The best thing participants can do is to raise a huge fuss about the bounty campaign and let others know that the project is a scam. That will at least deter a lot of people from participating in the ICO, and may force the project to pay bounty participants because of external pressure.

Also, I know a lot of projects are very good at "faking" like they're legitimate projects, but try to do as much research as possible on the project so that you're joining a scam project's bounty

Obviously, your opinion doesn’t reflect the real protections that many people have under international law. Too many people think like that and let scam projects get away with scamming. I would like to ask, why would you try to dissuade people from taking action to fix a real problem? But u did highlight a good point; laziness on the part of the victim to make an effort is what scam project depend on.

That is not a protection at all. Scam projects can also buy high ranking accounts too. You never know when a project (no matter how legit) will just refuse to pay the bounty; becoming a trend these days, because bounty hunter are too complacent and let them get away with h it. Even if you don’t think it matters, why wouldn’t you take just a little time to report it? Do u really think to just do nothing and say, “oh well” is better?

Sad to hear some of the comments here. Seems like many people are willing to live with a boot on there neck rather than try. Or maybe a scam project trolling the thread. Lol. As a person who has advanced degrees is business, believe me when I say bounty hunter have more options than they know. Get a lawyer and sue, if you have a case!! Stop weighing  your losses and weigh the injustice against the impact it will have later down the line!!

Don't join in any ico that the team are fake and the website content are copy-cat. Make sure before you join on the project they are real identity.

I think the best way to stop it in the first place is to stop joining scam bounty programs, As for me I don't just join bounty anyhow, I take my time to do research on the projects also you can follow some good bounty manager or bounty companies which will reduce the chance of anyone getting into scam bounty

This might be helpful but as well difficult because the identity of individual handling the project is invisible so it will be hard tracking them,just know that once you are scam,you are scam
The best way to avoid this is to make well research before joining any bounty to avoid been scam

This is a useless process that will take time and lead to nothing.  Although it would not be bad if the fraud was punished!

that's completely out of point and I don't think FBI can do anything about it. It's quite difficult to tell who is going to fraud you ahead of time. FBI is not allowed to release anything until investigation is over so you're shit out of luck on this one unless you can wait for months for peanuts. It is better to just stick to trustworthy ICO and spend some time looking at their investors and other things of that nature.

One way to stop ICOs scamming their bounty hunters is that that they deposit a part of the funds in an escrow account that would be released to the bounty hunters at the end of the campaign if the developers start something fishy.