Bitcoin Forum

Rather than make a long post, I will just say look at the "Archived Profiles" at the top right of https://bpip.org

A few seconds later, refresh the page - see how the number is going up?  Yes, there were (are?) that many people signing up per minute on this forum...

Most new accounts are not making any posts at all, meaning three months later they become archived.

This is a GOOD sign.  Before merit introduction, most of these profiles were making garbage posts.

We just need to wait until all the shitposter sMerit has been used up.  Then there will be NO incentive and no forum posts about bitcointalk being a "lottery win".

These new accounts can possibly even mean nuked accounts, right? While,I am seeing a lot of accounts being created and never being used, I don't see any reason for it.

Actually, after the merit system,I see a lot of plagiarism, use of text spinners and what not. so...

most likely those are accounts that got proxy-banned and abandoned by the users
and probably some are accounts that actually got nuked by admins
I see there is "deleted profiles" number, how you able to tell that? profile page is no longer accessible?

Plagiarism etc can be easily handled due to the smaller numbers compared to accounts that just joined to get rich...

I think theymos addressed this, and said that they were skipped randomly before(by accident).

Source:


Edit:

Finding posts that have used text spinners are hard, and its only possible if someone reads the entire mega thread with a shitload of shitposts.  :-\ They are handled only if they are reported.

Correct.   If I parse a profile and it comes back "The user whose profile you are trying to view does not exist." then it was deleted / skipped.

Yes, but it is still less work that dealing with three-four accounts a minute joining only for coin, which is what it was before the merit system was introduced  Remember, the actions you see today are based on accounts made three months ago...

I find plagiarism easier to deal with that pure one line shitposting


Pick a megathread in the altcoin discussion, just search for the matching text on the last 3-4 pages, report 10 or so copy-pasters till you feel you're going to get dumb just from reading that much crap, and then enjoy a beer while refreshing the modlog to see them getting banned :)

God...what the hell I'm doing with my life    ??? ;D

You're helping the forums, that's what.

I just recently learned about the modlog, so I'll be doing the same thing as you moving forward. The shit we geek out on on these forums... I guess it just means that we care :)

Hihi, I was just joking a little, or acting like a drama queen :D but I really sometimes feel depressed and powerless seeing the wave of copy-pasting in the alt section and I wonder if there will ever be an end to it.

I just started hunting for them after a moron decided my posts are too bad and used text-spinning to "improve" them, but spending an hour or two on this makes me think how do the mods manage to stay sane reading all those posts?
I swear, sometimes I feel like I'm going nuts if I read for the 20th time the same bs just with a two/three word difference.

There will be an end to it just as @Vod said that we just need to wait until all the sMerit circling in the forum been used up from those shitposters.

The same thing will happen now when most forum members discovered this forum through friends telling them that this is an easy way to earn money, the only difference now is that other people will discover this will know that its not and it is really hard to ranked up. So we will be seeing less people signing up supposedly.

I'm willing to wait (not that I have a choice), and I do agree that it'll happen with time.  I do think merit sources should be fairly selective who they give merits to.  We have at least one who gives 20 merits out routinely, which I think is excessive in most cases.

The merit requirement does prohibit most shitposters from ranking up, but it doesn't prevent them from participating in bounties.  We've had this discussion before, and it's off-topic here, but I think if those bounties would require a minimum rank OR a minimum amount of earned merits, that'd be the final nail in the shitposting coffin.

Totally agreed,should have some required merits but i doubt all of these campaign managers will cooperate.We should only allow those managers who required merits to create a bounty thread in that spam section.Spam wont stop unless these managers will require merits,because these shitty posters wont be able to participate nor benefit in the forum eventually they will leave for good.

Some possible solution for this :

1) Asking for email verification. Will reduce registration with bots.

2) Deleting old accounts with no activity.

3) IP restrictions being made more tough.

Problem with these steps is that it will affect genuine users registering on the forum as well.

There's a third category: New accounts prepared to start a spam run when needed. Considering the large number of new accounts, it's either bots registering, or a clickfarm. I wouldn't be surprised if spammers pay people to register new accounts.
If they're proxy-banned, they're most likely abandoned. But if they slip through, it's stockpiled for later use.

It depends: the plagiarism bots quickly evolve: they now shuffle words, replace them by synonyms, and/or do a homograph attack (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3094459.msg31946161#msg31946161).
Lately, I (and others) have gotten many homograph-bots banned. I think this actually hit them, because for the past few days, barely any new homographs were posted. The homographs were actually easier to get banned than "normal" spam, I don't know what they're using now.
Just like bump bots (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3955810.0) now use self-moderated threads (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4651497.0) to circumvent the 24h delete restriction.

Wont possible theymos doesnt want these email verifications as well as KYC for the members,deleting old accounts with no activity wont change anything.
IP Restriction could be bypassed by any VPN provider i personally use one so that i would stay anonymous atleast you can also use other browsers like TOR.
Most of the new accounts coming from those members who wants to earn more money with these signature campaigns which is the main cause of spam in this forum.

I think there are a lot of accounts being registered on the forum and being left inactive. You can see many such accounts registered years before without a single post. They are not posting anything here and thus not the cause of spam. May be they are aging the accounts for use in future.

And, you are right about the possible limitations or loopholes for the suggestions I gave.

According to hilariousetc on another topic, giving a merit requirement for joining bounties will only make them want to buy merits from other sources.

In my opinion, this can be both good and bad.
Good because we can identify the unscrupulous merit source and theymos can remove their privileges accordingly.
Bad because some people who made good posts but not yet received enough merit would have to wait - so I guess its a job better left to the hands of the bounty manager

You refuted your own suggestion. :)

bots can be prevented by some image verification like the one we have when we are logging in our accounts IMO.
There were no bots from the past few years but suddenly they just appeared and worsen the spam problem to this forum.Should have some trials for these bots,if they cant verify the image for 3x they should be permanently banned immediately.

That doesn't stop the bots, while it's very annoying for legit (Tor) users.

The money grabbing ICOs made bump bots a business (charging up to $1000 per thread per week).

I've had captchas that took me longer than that to solve.

I don't think it is actually in some cases. A lot of text spinners will change some of the text but with things like examples that people use and the general layout of the post, sometimes it can be a dead giveaway that they have copied and pasted the information.


Why according to hilariousetc, this is obviously going to happen?
If there is a requirement to join in bounties then people will be striking up deals with each other for merits...

It wouldn't be a problem for the bots either. reCAPTCHA uses tokens to verify solving the challenge. Each token is valid for 2 minutes and is accepted for any captcha on that domain. So they have a server just brute forcing captcha solves until it gets a token for bitcointalk.org and then it can be passed out to a waiting worker bot to use. You'll never see a bot failing the captcha.

Most new accounts don't seem to be conributing anything at all here. Most are just bounty hunters or people looking to sig spam because their schoolmate/workmate/cousin/sister told them they can earn here. The ones that don't make any posts are likely either nuked, proxybanned or never made it past the six minute limitations etc. If you have a bot that tries to post every few seconds but has to wait six minutes then they'll never get anywhere.


Email verification is hardly KYC. I don't think I've ever joined a forum that didn't require you to verify your email. Seems a basic requirement and it would help curb a lot of bots or at least it's one more hoop for them to jump through.


It would be better to take them on a case by case basis. Any shitposter with a handful of accounts could probably give himself enough merit to meet the minimum merit requirements to join, whereas a great poster just may have slipped through the cracks. If a great poster applies but hasn't got any or much merits then I don't think they should be denied.

These are things we are currently facing, this is inevitable because everyone knows that in this forum we are given the opportunity to earn income. I will not close my eyes that there is a sale and purchase transaction of a BTT account. This is the basis that nowadays more and more people are trying to make many accounts and what they have in mind is how to get a greater chance of earning income. Most of them don't give useful contributions and just make spam, but don't say that applies to everyone because there are still users who do have quality and they join this forum with the aim of gaining knowledge and experience around the world of cryptocurrencies.

for what i have seen those account, or part of them, are being used to participate in all sort of bounties, i have been controling an airdrop spreadsheet and found out many of those users in there didn't exist anymore. I seriously doubt that all those new accounts are created for no reason at all.

When both solutions are bad, one has to choose the better solution even if it’s far from being perfect. Yes, making a merit/rank requirement for bounty participation will create a whole new black market of merit trading (if it doesn’t already exist...). It will probably have other unwanted effects. However, it will reduce the spam. Dramatically. I believe spam is currently by far the largest and most annoying problem in BTT. Solving it should be top priority even if new issues would arise.

You have no idea of the amount of money these shitposters make from the bounties sections. Take a look the alt accounts reporting thread in "Reputation" and you will see the shitposters who became millionaires by abusing bounties with their alts. Of course every third world beggar will come to this forum to continue this legacy and get paid handsomely in return. Who would want to do a 9-5 Job for such?

Spam is a problem for the forum but its also the job of the bounty manager to keep track of such people. Most of them (except a few) dont do their job properly.

Would it be outrageous to red-tag the bounty managers with negative feedback for showing untrustworthy behavior by accepting obvious alts and shitposters for their campaigns? I personally find this type of behavior to be untrustworthy... They are just allowing users into their campaign to maximize visibility for their products/clients, and they blatantly turn a blind eye to shitposters and copypasta to make and pay a quick buck. Not okay, in my book.

Negative feedback doesn't deter all members from dealing with that specific account, but at least it will let bounty managers know that they need to take their responsibilities more serious.

Just a thought.

As alt buster I can tell that a storm of accounts are created only for few posts when they join airdrops, sometimes they use the account for 1 post and after that they change the account.

Funny that there are no copy/paste posts in this thread yet. No one-words replies either. I am often amazing by some of the replies I see on the forum. Sometimes people are so stupid that they literally copy the reply right about theirs and don't add anything at all. I wonder why people waste there time doing that. I don't really completely understand the benefits of having a higher post count. Even if it's greatly beneficial, it seems like you will just get caught immediately with such ineffective tactics. I agree that we could use some better clean-up measures on here.

Its the manager's choice to think whether they would accept "known alts" or SMAS known spammers into a campaign or even accept a red tagged account. If they are willing to do so then its bad for the project they are advertising but with due respect do the ICO team care about spam or do they just want to exposure?

Its not okay it needs rules to be controlled. If some DT members are going to a harsh stance against such managers they would be called out in the community as trying to monopolise the bounty manager business - even though its actually for the community. But if we have global rules in the forum then it is a different thing. But that wont happen anytime soon.

While looking and searching spreadsheets in each bounty, I was shocked that almost half of thr participants is a Jr. Member and it's a recently created accounts.

That's the reason why I keep pushing myself reporting those accounts to avoid them earning stakes in the bounty. There's a cycle behind this shitposting scenerio, If a Jr. Member was accused as a cheater and received a Red Trust, they can easily register a new account or there are reserved accounts that is ready again to spam the discussion. As you can see, only 30% of the community who takes the discussion seriously and the rest are just typical bounty hunters who want to earn huge profit by shitposting

So while thinking a solution to this, Merit system should be updated and put some Merit requirement atleast 5 merits before reaching the Jr. Member, Hmm  ??? ?
I think the "Report to Moderator" tool is not enough because there are too many of them, Shitpost there, Shitpost here. This kind of activity is very known even in local boards.  

Regarding in the bounty managers, they don't usually check the accounts of the participants to determine if it's a bounty abusers because it's really hard to manage a Bounty campaign consist of thousand participants. For example, In sylon's bounty, Since he is a good and famous Manager, many people always join to his campaign. If there's no bounty hunting, those people will not exist in this well- organized forum.

One does not always need to make posts. Some prefer to gain information from this forum and find answers to their question. Not all the accounts registered with the intent to post anything.

Truer words have never been spoken. It's kind of ironic, knowing that there are a bunch of lurker accounts who are here to gain knowledge; I consider these types of users to be healthy for the forums. The irony is that those good users don't often contribute, while the shitposters that are here to earn a quick buck flood the forums :P

Agreed.  I started out here as a lowly lurker, and at the time I thought bitcoin was some sort of scam based on the amount of scams going on here.  This was around the time that there was a bitcoin magazine being published, and I would have sworn that was going to be a scam as well.  I registered here around the time that I stopped believing that bitcoin wasn't some gigantic electronic money fad.  I didn't know what a signature campaign was until a few months into my time here.

Nowadays we've got people being referred to bitcointalk from friends and family solely for signature campaigns and bounties, and that's not a good thing.  They have zero incentive to be anything other than a shitposter.  Some of them are so illiterate that they couldn't possibly be anything other than that, and once they get banned they start again with a new account that goes undetected until it finally gets banned again.  It's sad and it's frustrating for the rest of us who aren't here for that reason.

How about an antidote to this along these lines:

let's make a new section "For real" where condition to participate would be similar to

1) have an old private key with a tx in 2015/2014/2013
2) have a current private key with at least 0.1BTC (a typical condition for exchanges' trollboxes)
3) ?

Additional to my reply,

If you can see in the reputation section, almost of the accounts that getting red trusts are Jr. Members. There are many people creating multiple accounts that is equivalent to the stakes given in Full Member or Sr. Member on bounties.

These accounts result shitposting in the forum and spreading of toxicity in each threads and discussions.

e.g.

In signature campaign,

Jr. Member - 1 stake
Full Member - 5 stakes

Those people creates 5 accounts to match the income of the Full Member in every campaign. In our local, my goal is to diminish the bounty hunters group that abuse the bounties and send each other some bounty campaign links to gain profit. The abusive activity of bounty hunters show that they just only want money without learning any information about investments, projects and other knowledge in crypto.  :(

I strongly agree with that, the merit system that had implemented here didn't actually make a thing if we are going to look on the whole forest, there might be some who changed their post into a good quality to acquired some merits to level up their rank but the majority still didn't changed, they are contented on shit posting because they don't want to make efforts on earning merits.

I bet what is running on their minds is that, who does needs merits?, something like that, what I mean is that they could still earn on their current rank while shit posting and there are too many people with that kind of attitude.

Those who changed posting habits would not easily get merits from posting because inherently they are shitposters and their habit of shitposting to get paid wont change by the introduction of merit in the profiles. Rather not getting merited/ranked up would make them frustrated to make more shitposts. Still merit has controlled these people from ranking up and thus demoralize these people from doing bounties. Which is a good thing.

In the long run the mentality of "free money" needs to change and thats what merit is helping to achieve. Its not something that is perfect but it is a radical measure to curb these bottomfeeders.

We already have a serious section, Ivory Tower (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=251.0) and the priv key requirement would just lead to another market, we had the accounts market, now the merit market, and we would have old priv key market.

There is absolutely no need for this, remove the signature in a section and no spammer will set foot there.

People will just end up just buying old addresses which are worthless to most people who have them, but you'll certainly create a new market for them with this suggestion. There would be better ways of doing this as well and I've made a couple recently: You could have special boards that are only available to users who received x amount of merit or users who have made x amount of reports. I think special hidden boards for users who have received a lot of merit or made a lot of reports would be a nice perk and the discussion in there (especially the merit board) would probably be a good way to ensure that only quality discussion goes on.

I think some of the new accounts that are being created here are done by newbies who doesn't have any bitcoin to pay for the Evil IP thing and that is the reason maybe they abandon their account.

Anyway, this forum is a place for learning and most new users who registered here on the forum have 2 reasons. Either to learn or to earn but most of them are here to earn. They see this forum as their workplace. They are bounty hunters who don't contribute anything but spam to the forum.

I disagree. I recently created a new account (for a company project to be announced soon) and I did not face any IP restrictions by the forums, even though I already own two accounts here (disclosed on my feedback page).

I believe that the high turnover of new account creations and subsequent abandonment is due to the large amount of bounty hunter guides and tutorials floating around the web. New users who are promised fortunes probably register an account, find a few bounty threads, and realize that they don't want to do all the repetitive and spammy shit for a few bucks. I think it's safe to assume that not everyone who appeases their curiosity of "earning mega profits online at bitcointalk forums by bounty hunting!" by clicking through to the threads are all greedy money-grubbing spammers, which seems to be indicated (imo) by the amount of users abandoning their accounts.

The Evil IP fee only applies to addresses that accounts have been banned on. So just creating a new account wouldn't mean you would have to pay. The spambots are using proxy services and when they sign up an account there is a high probability that it will be from an Evil IP address and they are asked to pay a fee which they obviously wouldn't. There was another thread looking at the stats here and they found 77% of recent accounts are still ranked Brand New.

Recently evil IP payment has been threading all over the forum which I believed it will makes a lot of beginners to abandon their new account simply because they have no Idea on how to make the payment. Secondly some newbies are here with greedy habit to make huge money account night as a result they may fall into the wrong hands and get scam which will make them to abandon their account.

Probably these users were spammers and they didn't actually contribute to the forum as of these days. Most of their thoughts were useless and some posted short lines with non sense ideas. This could not do anything good for the forum, and worst it made the bitcointalk forum flooded with their spams. With the merit system I suggest that this brand new accounts shouldn't be ranking up unless a merit will be given, and for that reason spam and non sense posting quality will be eliminated here.

But the problem here is people are going to an English-speaking 'school' for a subject they don't have any interest or knowledge in and many can't speak English very well in the first place, but are only going because there's some payment in it for them for 'attending'. When I was in college if you parents earned under a certain amount you got a thing called Educational Maintenance Allowance. There were some people in my class who were quite open that they wouldn't be there if it wasn't for that, and they didn't really want to be there and would do the minimal amount of work possible and just slack off. They really shouldn't have been there and were sometimes quite disruptive to the rest of the class. The same thing is happening here. Most of the new users don't care about Bitcoin and are just here to earn and it's ruined the experience for everyone else in the process. That's the same problem we have here.

The question is, are the new accounts' reason why they are created here is to contribute here in the forum?? To be honest, this thread has been created because this is true that new accounts don't contribute here. Oh they are contributing, contributing spam thru bounties.

When the merit system is not been implemented here, there were lots of spammers in the forum because ranking is not that hard but now its implemented now. New accounts are not created to contribute, they are being created for the sake of bounty hunting and this is the truth. Yeah, there are some newbies who are learning and you can find information anywhere in the forum but most of the new accounts don't contribute here.

High ranked members here doesn't need you to spoon feed all of the information because you can see it here already and one thing, there is a website called google.com where you can do some research in case what you need to research is not here.

Maybe you are haven't learned anything because you are just here for bounty hunting too. right??

I would also add to your words, that the problem isn`t only in lack of interest in the topic, but absolute indifference and disrespect to the fact that the adherents of the forum have been building for several years. When a child comes to a new school, he doesn`t begin to destroy the established system there and violate the rules of the community. What do newbies think about themselves? Why they are sure they can ignore the rules that were originally written on the forum?

I understand that the problem hasn`t been solved yet in many respects due to the absence of proper sanctions. Beginners don`t have fear, they aren`t afraid even to be banned, because they know they can create thousands and thousands of accounts to earn their tokens. But I'm not talking about this right now. It is about culture and respect for someone else's work. The forum wasn`t created in one day. People, who have reached Hero and Legendary ranks have written their posts not in one minute. Think about what efforts from the administrator and the conscious participants the creation and development of this platform required. I`m very disappointed that a huge number of spammers and bounty hunters not just don`t admire the work done, but also openly disregard and neglect the rules and traditions of this forum.

When I was a newbie, I tread carefully. Spoke only when I was sure the information would be helpful and when it wasn't, I asked questions instead. But let's not forget there are two categories of newbies okay maybe three.

The actual newbie
The newbie owned by an old timer (concurrently),  and
One who lost his account

I guess with the merit system it's really hard moving up if you are only incentivized by money matters. A host of category 1 and 2 will drop drastically, except they have a means to rank up easily (doubt that), category 3 are still the ones with genuine intentions, I think¡

Yes, let's say it's natural law, this world has many colors. If we see it only black and white or right and wrong without being able to see from various sides, maybe for beginners need knowledge of knowledge in the world of crypto and Bitcoin,
So for that, maybe with this post, it can contribute more in everything, people need teachers and read to not be empty in the world, just like Bitcointalk.

I give them 90 days before I move them to archive.  Three months should be enough time to contribute.

The evil IP works only if one user from that IP is banned, otherwise you can log in more accounts at the same time with a new fresh IP.

Accounts might be dormant for many reasons, including read only users, who are only interested in reading and learning.
I feel the so called  shitposters know about the natural system, before joining

And what do you contirubute? Throwing random feedbacks at anyone anytime?
You are fagot, and many know this.
What point do you have acting as a dick? No point i quess. Then what illness you have? Bipolaric? Autism?

Vod's feedback in your case was a little bit harsh, given that you tried putting up collateral--I don't know anything about cargocoin tokens, but apparently the issue is that they're not traded on exchanges yet and therefore if you defaulted on your loan, the lender would be stuck, hoping that eventually he'd be able to sell them.  Does that about sum it up?

Did you get the loan you were asking for? m0gliE looked interested in doing it for you, but there's no followup in that thread.  I can't speak for Vod, but there might be an outside chance that if someone loans you that 0.1BTC and you pay it back on time and to the lender's satisfaction, Vod might reconsider the neg.  But calling him names and spamming his trust page with retaliatory negs, calling him a scammer won't work in your favor. 

People get tagged here for offering worthless collateral, because if the lender accepts it, they can very easily get scammed since the borrower (especially if it's a new account) has nothing to lose by defaulting on the loan.  In your case, Vod judged it as that kind of situation.  I said the feedback was harsh, but as I said I'm pretty ignorant about cargocoin tokens and whether they can eventually be sold or not.  If there's no chance, then the feedback is certainly appropriate.

My loan was granted. Collateral deposited. Btc received. Was i trying to scam someone?

Don't know how much you value your BCT account, but if you don't care about it, I'm not going to continue this discussion.  However, if you're looking to possibly salvage it, 1) remove those retaliatory negs on Vod, 2) stop posting that he's a scammer (he's not), 3) post proof that you got the loan, provided the collateral, and then paid the lender back. 

Vod is reasonable, but I know he doesn't appreciate behaviors like the ones you've displayed after him negging you and again, any appeal is between you and him--as I said, I can't speak for him.  He has been known to remove feedback depending on the actions of the tagged member. 

Who gave you the loan?  When is it due?  Can you provide the Txid for the bitcoin sent to you?

If you're looking to clear your name, start up a new thread in the Reputation section with that information.  All of this is off-topic here.

Why do i need to prove anything? Because of what?
He isnt scammer? You say. Am i?
Text him to remove his feedback, and dont trow his ass in not his bussiness.
Do i care my account? How do you think? Thats not because of account, thats because some fagot(vod) being absolutely wrong.

Adults, when they have a disagreement, present a logical argument backed up by evidence to support their position. Children in the same situation rant and rave and call people names.

Spamming his trust page and multiple threads he started with off-topic nonsense and calling him a "fagot" will not help your case.

Once your loan is repaid, open a new thread in reputation with links to the relevant posts and transaction IDs.

Why should i prove you anything? I repeat.
Of what arguments was his feedback based?
Stop being "friendly" with higher rank members. Doesnt it look funny?
Same situation would be to compare: i called him fagot, and now he need to prove that he is not. Getting medical statements or something. Than he can post pictures here and i will stop calling him so. My friends could back me up if needed.

I never made a judgement on whether his feedback was accurate or not, I simply pointed out that spamming his threads and his trust page and calling him names isn't a mature way to handle a disagreement and won't help you solve it.

Although I have to say, the idea of getting a medical statement to prove you aren't a "fagot" made me laugh. Maybe there is some new blood test or scan I don't know about.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5086002.msg48935009#msg48935009

@MS69 You have -ve probably because you have tried to use worthless tokens as collateral and to be honest you previously tried to sell CRGO tokens http://archive.li/hrhqy
I didn't go deep into this ICO, I can only say team is selling tokens for $1 each and collateral might worth much more than 400$.
At the moment your collateral equals 0$, so lender is aware of the risk and they accepted it because they have their own reason. That is all I will say here, if you want to discuss this do it privately with Vod or create thread in reputation.

Sorry for off topic.

Hey,

Just to update I did grant the loan, which seems to have been a mistake.

Still I was interested in the ICO so considering the collateral it had a good value to me at least.

In the end loan is still not repaid, the newbie is saying please wait before selling the collateral but he's late.

I'm striking a deal with the colateral for about 25% more than the loan value so I can't really say I've been scammed xD
If he doesn't rapay today i'll just make it worth it by selling the collateral. But unless he repays shortly he indeed doesn't seem like he was planning to repay.


Moral of the story: Only lend what you're willing to lose for a colateral you're willing to keep at this price :D

Turns out he was a scammer, and Vod was right all along... He still logs into the forum but doesn't post anything.

I don't know if you can consider this a scam...

I mean technically he's just late and assured me he would repay tomorrow. It's not like he stopped answering.

I've put the deal on hold. If he repays tomorrow he gets the collateral back and you can say he's not a scammer. But indeed I have high doubts.

I think the better option is not to opt for those shitty tokens. ETH, LTC, IOTA or basically those old players remain the safest bet.