Bitcoin Forum

Today I managed to do research on cerlos bounty project and I find few red flags that I will like to share with you guys, here is the bounty project link

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5226965.0

1. At first, the red flag I spotted was the teams pictures, how hard can it be that teams can't take high quality pictures with a camera or their smartphones instead they used blurry pictures and it's same pictures on their LinkedIn account, the only difference is color, Black and White.

2. Secondly the CEO himself has two different names, the project website ( cerlos.io ) says Robert Bedard and on another website ( myitguyrob.com ) says Robert .H , to me I think the real Robert is Robert .H because the same picture was used on myitguyrob.com website, here is a screenshot from myitguyrob.com

https://i.imgur.com/OPEt29r.png

3. Another red flag is one of the team advisor named ( Antoon Eggenhuizen ) which real name is unknown but another LinkedIn account says this man name is (Jaap Kolk ), below is another screenshot to back my claim

https://i.imgur.com/e9BgpWC.png

Now my question to all bounty hunters promoting this project is, what the hell are you guys doing? How do you even do research in the first place? These scams aren't that hard to see , I'm surprised many bounty hunters joined, this have a lot to say that people don't do research anymore and yet you will see them creating posts about not getting paid from bounty projects on this forum when the fault was theirs, Grow up Hunters, Grow up.

Yes, you are right! Bounty hunter will never learn. Because whenever they see a bounty they don't waste time because they become busy to submit their POA! New participants are coming continuously, so, they won't do research which is normal, maybe I was the same when I was new! But mate I am really worried and feeling worst that how can high ranked member goes for those scammy, shitty low reward bounties!

Some participants are just bots who keep registering blindly even after the project is over, especially the ones who make social media posts. Translators applying don't care about the project or that the manage is a newbie but just want to do work and then cry scam. Forget about even bounty participants, why investors get fooled here? They have a telegram group where people are interested in the token sale.

Also, here the reason is the token is listed on their unknown exchange and trading without volume (cause no tokens have been released I guess) and the project doesn't require KYC and hence they got thousands of social media participants. :D

The smart bounty hunters should be able to understand right now that almost all bounty hunters on this forum aren't doing their own part of finding truth about projects before promoting them, following hunters will only mislead you

Hunters are always in rush and too eager to make quick profit which leads to blindness to necessary things to watch out for, I don't blame these hunters for their actions, I think they deserve it when they don't get paid

And after a while, those bounty hunters complained why there were so many scam projects in this space. And how to limit projects like that. I was very surprised because they joined the bounty without offering any research on it, if they had learned and learned from the beginning, they would definitely have avoided these scam projects.

now that you have brought this up, they may now realize it. it takes a lot of research actually and some of the bounty hunters are just not that good at research. i have tried looking into this CLEROS  but didn't uncover what you have found out. good for you. it would have been more devastating if you find out after a month from now. keep warning others about this and change its title so that people will know.

The first time I checked the project out I knew it's red flag just like OP says, the use case turned me off because it's not something that needs to be on blockchain technology, building materials are offline things and it should stay that way

Bounty hunters never care about the projects they only care about the rewards,the project you uncovered looks like having decent amount od bounty rewards so everyone who notices this thread will register straight away and expecting to make money by their continuous tasks.

Let them learn by their mistakes, for some people it takes 1 one lesson and for some it might take forever.

It's not about they never learn from their mistake before, but there are some ICOs which are looking good but in the end it will be scam their participants. Surely if they are only faked their Team, it's more easier to find rather than when they run away after Ico ends

nice catch there op . i remember this tactic was also use by others  before ,  this is one way to hunt if the project is fake or not  . if people complain that they arent paid that only means that they arent doing it or they dont do other basic practice to spot a fake projects  . just dont mind them and dont stress your self too much on them  .  thats what they want , i gues they want to learn from thier mistake but others are already improving and havent fall from scams anymore  . those are the ones that we should be proud with

Nice catch mate. Actually this isnt hard at all to do, the problem with some hunters are their attitude. Being lazy is one way to describe it. If you cant do such simple thing such as this, then you may never know that youre only wasting effort. People who keeps doing a routine work like this will know how to prevent any scam and save much time to find more legit ones.


Also this one might be a good response. People working on scam projects arent amateur and even though they are scammer they still in line with the acts of their doing only minor slippage such as this is not always present to a professional scammer.


@for OP So dont blame all of them. You might just lucky to find an easy one but others are more harder than this.

This is very laughable, when people hear that you can make money on this forum promoting other projects they quickly want to join as if it's always that easy, research is what most don't want to do, people like dreaming in their head whereas action speaks more

Bounty hunters should start understanding the importance of research, without research you will be like a stray bullet that can hit anything that's never aimed for, you will be vunerable to scam projects

Only few of the many here really cared to review the project they are joining, it's a good thing you bring it out here, hopefully the manager itself first will see and conduct and investigation, if the manager finds it shady then he should be the one to stop the campaign, and participants will surely understand.

It means the bounty manager himself is not a serious type, how can he even accept such project just to ruin his reputation? I guess it's same mistakes that bounty hunters use to do, lack of research

Yes you're right. Projects that does not have any value in the market and some projects are just copying or editing the ideas of the previous projects. We should be carefully analyze and study of what kind of project are we will be joining. I always check every details of the project on what are they aiming to. Check always the team behind that project, read the whitepaper or simply what is their objective.
Some bounty hunters are just greedy and simply joined every campaigns they want. It's easy to trick them and they just waste their time and effort doing it then after the project is ended they blaming them why they are not paid. It's their fault not to check it first.

The fastest way to detect scam projects is clicking on their image and searching with google image search engine and you will get some secrets in return, nice try OP, nice try, this is very simple and easy

Not a surprising thing because if people do able to see million usd allocation then they do directly jumped in without any hesitations as long they do have that thing in mind that they would make big money in the end of the campaign ones they had been paid up with shit tokens.  ;D

Nice spot here op and this should how people do make some research yet it doesnt really cost huge time for you to spot these red flags.Majority of launched projects as of this moment are just pure scams and frauds.
This would still continue as long there are people who do still advertise and spread up the word and the cycle repeats.

That's only work if their team are only copy pasting from image which we can find on google. How if they are use some photos or images which there isn't on google? How can you detect them? That's why it's big risk to join on altcoin bounty

That's what bounty hunters do, they don't think long in the future, how the project will run, especially if it's been caught like this, falsifying the CEO's photo, even though that's the most important thing before joining this bounty.
I am not so sure about this project so I never researched it, maybe at the end it will be a scam too.  ;D
What I saw in the spreadsheets was a lot of new participants and this project was on average promoted by a layman really annoying.

Whatever happens to you is your own fault, as a bounty Hunter it's must to use research ability to pick good projects, we have nothing but 'research' to safe our neck and time when joining bounties, if you want good results you know what to do, most bounty hunters from Asian parts of the world like Indian and Philippines are the worst hunters I know of, they simply never cared about end results

This is the most effective way IMO. Google is always been a helpful tool as search engine and one thing is for sure all data related to what you search will show up including images, videos and etc.

I guess, money can buy anything and even his reputation is at stake he is willing to sell it off. Hunters should not do what they could chew off cause later on its gonna be a hell of a mess.

As some bounty hunters find it hard to do research it's same thing with some bounty managers, it's better to find reliable bounty managers if you find it hard to choose new bounty projects, BMs like bubbalex ,arteezy, juelerz12 are still very trusted

They are scammers for a reason. While it is true that many projects are scam, it is not always possible to detect a scam within proper time. The bounty hunters are less knowledgeable regarding this. They check a couple of accounts and then think that the project is legit. Specially the fist few team member links are often like that.

One will understand what I am trying to say if they have done a thorough research on these projects. But bounty hunters will always suffer if they are not careful.

Very true, I was investigating a new bounty on this forum but I can't find any copy of the images used as team member on the project's website, I used almost all image search engine available, I wonder what's next to easily detect scam projects now

You are to see bounties hunter as a gambler because we have see so many projects that were classified as scam here and at the end those projects turned out to be one of the best rewards coins or tokens of that time. We are all here seeking for opportunities and at that participating in some of these bounties may turn out to be a rewarding decision.

Most of the time they do uncover or do know things when the project is already on the concluding phase when theres no time for you to go back or you already have done the works until you realize that you are dealing with the wrong or fake devs.Scams now do become conservative and comes too realistic even how careful you are on making up some search but this doesnt guarantee you out on not to step to these fake or fraud ones.
Just stick with some basic rules on identifying things like legit dev and some realistic project goal compared to those who do keep telling almost impossible things.Ive encountered it for how many times
and these projects are destined to fail.

They will never learn unless someone will give advice to them not to join that campaign or tell them how they will know if it a scam project or not. Some people browse already and figure out how they will not trap from scammers. Many projects are just copying the idea of project that have been successfully launch then try to create different name of their token. I always check the environment of their website and it's the first thing that I do then read the ANN thread about the review of the project. If the campaign haven't project team and some suspicious names and image are stated this will be hint for another a scam project.

Sadly they dont learn and repeat the same mistake. The mindset that bounty hunting is a easy way to make free money is a wrong one because there is no such thing as free money.

Like I have said, it is a cat and mouse game. You catch one and another one will appear. They scam and make money from these scams so they continue doing so ripping bounty hunters and investors.

It is easier to conclude that these projects are all going to be failures. No use hunting behind them and no use trying to find a pin in a haystack. The days of ICOs being big are long gone and it has been 3years where no such coin has risen to come close to bitcoin.

What you are explaining are good pointers on how to avoid bad projects to promote in bounty campaign, however, it's not really expected that majority would do due diligence before joining a campaign, for the reason that they are lazy and some of them does not really have an idea about what is crypto, they were just invited by some friends, do some lazy job and expect some return, pretty much they think its still 2017.

To be able to see a great project, bounty hunters should think like a real investor.

Most of them is just a copy and never add any ideas belong to them which is i think the reasons why more of the ICO failed.

Greed to raise funds from investors that is the reasons why more of the project failed they dont want to use a money from thier own pocket they just use an easy way to advertise which is we called (  bounty ).

I wish this is possible, even without full regulation, this would help a lot as nothing beats an educated bounty hunter.
And if they are investing at the same time, it's impossible that they will allow to dump the coin which would only result to a struggle of the project in the future.

I agree here. I have many projects following the same sector of the market, like gaming coins, advertisement revenue system ICOs and so on which have all failed horribly because these market are highly saturated by big players in the contemporary fiat ecosystem. They dont have a crypto version maybe but having so many ICOs do that is also a blunder.

Again this point seems easy to understand now but was difficult to understand when the hype was on.

Whether project owners have been greedy with paying the hunters less is also a debatable question. While hunters always feel self entitled, there are cheaters who ruin the projects bounty funds and make the other hunter suffer.

by searching it in the web you can easily see thier fake identity.
But to be honest more of the scam project use thier real photo and identity tomake it easier to investor's to belive in them.

The large raised funds scam by a project is not came from fake people but in the real persons that promising a fake project.

Is this the right place to discuss this problem? I may will be happy if you move it to scam accusation if there is no thread who have been discussing it.

There might just a few bounty huntee who wonted to see the scam accusation thread and they will be spared to promote scam project.

But for those who just open this forum for bounty section only then they will never aware of it. Even, most of them will keep promote the project because they didn't know that the project is scam and it is horrible.

I'll be agree if this forum's rule obligate for those bounty hunter even for all user to have an understanding to spot scam project at least they know the basic knowledge to differentiate the legit and scam project.

Upto the OP to post it there if they wish too.

True but we dont see much of them coming to check these sections at all. Their life here is only login-bounty-logout. ;D

They will come back, like 4months after completion of the promo and spam the bounty thread begging for reward and not reading the posts. Sucks to be these pople.

You cannot help a person who has a flawed insight and does not know how to judge investments. There is nothing called free money here. Anything being given out free will end up being your loss.

try to pay attention to the social media of the project team that you promote usually they have other photos, I usually use a search on google images and there are some images that are not displayed in search engines because they edit and make images feel different in search engines

I am impressed with the simple but strong research, at least you decrypted the hidden information behind the bounty campaign. The project doesn't look like promising but there is another reason why bounty hunters join this camping. The exchange promises make the project attractive compared to the alternative projects with no idea about the listing on exchanges.

They have grown to know better you know. Scammers are cunning so they know how we research to prevent being caught. What they do is modify the fake team image in such a way that the pictures yield zero search results on search engines.

Thing is the fools will always be fooled because human stupidity has no end.

Now the only way to stop being scammed by them is to stop investing in ICOs and stop hunting any bounties provided for them. If you are willing to take the risk and the anxiety thereafter then they can do as they wish.

Good job guys, and I hope you do it more, and I hope more people pay attention. I don't know about bounty hunters where you are but the ones I came into contact with, they actually KNOW things are scams? And they know the fake users and fake team etc, but they look at the chance of listing and pumping to decide if they join.

So is it their fault? Hell yes. Will they ever learn? Look around, right?;)

As Starters we all made mistake . but nowadays it is to hard to find a good ICO.
that's why we really need to research and know the campaign which it will take time.

but joining airdrops are not hassle for me as a bounty hunter. sometimes i get lucky.
but not doing risk on donating a small amount of coin for an airdrop.

if i get lucky on a specific coin then ill use it to invest on a known coin so we all are gonna be a risk taker on joining an ICO .
so even though we do a hard research we don't know if what will be the price at the end of the campaign.

Newbies have to make mistakes to learn, I did same thing and I learn from it, the problem is if you fail and refuse to learn from it, no matter how good you are you will fall for scam projects

Ah, finally i found this thread, this is what I thought before. i dont know why the bounty hunters still participate in this bounty and still get a lot of attention. Another reg flag for me is why cerlos pay the bounty hunter with other token, (cgcx token) while the cgcx itself indicate as scam project. I am now looking for the answers but still haven't got it about connection Cerlos with CGCX project. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3360185.msg54045617#msg54045617)

They do never learn and even up to these years there are still a lot who do decide to engage into these things without even thinking that most of the time they are just wasting their effort and time on dealing with this.
I cant blame them if they do mainly act if they do saw that the said project is talking about exchange listing yet this had been the main target for most hunters because they do know that they can able to sell their coins once they have received it in the end of the campaign but they havent realized that dealing with scam projects will surely mess out their expectations.

A bounty hunter learning from his mistakes does not cost him money and therefore it's not risky.

While for investors learning from their mistakes, they will lose money first before they'll try to learn from their mistakes, that's the big difference, therefore we should not be afraid to make mistakes as a bounty hunter, as we will never lose money but only time.

Yes it doesn't cost money when you promote fake project but time is money, all bounties requires is your time and energy, you could spend your time on other things than wasting your time on useless things