Bitcoin Forum

What happened: The CEO of SantaCoin.io is saying that the bounty did not meet his expectations and as such he is not going to pay.

Scammers Profile Link:
The CEO's account on Telegram: https://t.me/cryptosantax /  (https://t.me/cryptosantax /)
The CEO's account on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cryptosantax (https://twitter.com/cryptosantax)
The Community Manager's account on Telegram: https://t.me/Phelbaby (https://t.me/Phelbaby)

Social Media for the SantaCoin Project:
Website: https://santacoin.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/santa_coin
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Santa_Coins

Reference Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5372771.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5372771.0)
Bounty Manager: Hhampuz (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=881377)
Amount Scammed: $15,000
Payment Method: USDT
Proof of Payment: N/A

PM/Chat Logs:

https://i.imgur.com/7aGdKxm.jpg

Additional Notes: This is a warning to all investors that the SantaCoin Project is a scam project and the SantaCoin team has not fulfilled their promises to the bounty hunters who worked hard to promote their project for 4 consecutive weeks.

The sad thing is that this project was managed by a very trusted member of this forum who is Hhampuz. He did his best to get the bounty hunters their rewards but to no avail, I think they paid him for posting this bounty for 4 weeks and he didn't escrow the hunters's money because of his trust in the project team, but in the end, the hunters are the victim of this Scam.

What hunters should do is

1- Wear the following avatar and post it on social media accounts.
https://i.imgur.com/NyXx5MP.jpeg

2- Report SantaCoin on Twitter and on Telegram.

3- Copy the following message and post it everywhere on articles, websites, forums, telegram, etc.

I am not sure if doing a "This project is scam" campaign is a good start. It might very well be a scam, but you should have given that thought before deciding to participate in it not after that.

The bounty manager is not directly involved in getting the money to pay the bounty participants but organizing the bounty only, I suggest you remove their name from this thread.

phelbaby account exists here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1255347
they have used the same username on telegram in their messages on the forum archived here - https://archive.fo/8qeza#selection-3923.19-3923.28

To be honest, the santacoin team never showed their faces or names or identity information anywhere during the process when the project was launched. Their litepaper is a generic one without any details about who created the project.

Every Christmas we see such projects come up. The scam bounty project "C" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2494912.0) Why even bother joining such bounties?

Most of the project don't give the bounty budget to bounty manager because there's a risk that the manager will run the funds since we are all anonymous here. In Hhampuz case, I'm pretty sure that the team backstabbed him for not paying the agreed budget for bounty hunters. This is the reality on bounty campaign. You didn't sign any agreement that will give you protection from the company that's why they can easily cut ties to bounty hunters once they don't want the result.

I highly suggest to post this on social media and tag there CEO so that everyone will be aware on how shady this company is.

It's sad to know another scam project "Santacoin" and it hurts the bounty hunters feeling who devote full support to the project. Its very hard to think initially that the project could be a scam when it is managed by one of the best bounty managers. The best thing what bounty managers can do is to get the tokens or coins upfront with them but then again if someone made the token for scam purpose, even if it gets distributed it's of no value.

Participants should now the risk on what they are participating to and this kind of scene is becoming normal on bounty scene that's why they need to prepare themselves to face situation like this and never blame anyone especially there manager if something bad happens. But as  virasog said maybe at least next time its best to escrow the bounty funds to assure that the campaign participants will get paid I think this is lesson to the managers knowing many devs now escape after they conduct a successful sale and will never pay their participants and scam their investors.

I'm still very active in the bounty campaign and I accept the fact that the developer is the one responsible if they want to reward or not their bounty hunters regardless of who is running the campaign, even if the bounty managers tried to escrow the tokens, the bounty manager can only make a disclaimer that he is not holding the tokens or is not escrowed and bounty hunters should be joined at his own risk, even without this disclaimer if you know how the altcoin bounty campaign works, you know that there's always a possibility that you will not get paid, I have been into a lot bounty projects where participants did not get paid.
You did the right thing in posting it here so investors will know that they are not honest, this token will eventually become worthless.

I don't know what really happened in the background and what's the team terms gave to Hhampuz for running the campaign. As Hhampuz stated on the screenshot, The campaign didn't meet the team expectations result that's why they are not paying. Its either the project don't get enough fund on there IDO or they really have a terms regarding the result that's why they are not paying.

Was there any agreement that took place between the manager of the campaign and the team that they will only release the funds and pay the participants if they meet certain expectations?  I don't think there was any such thing and the Santacoin team is just using it as an excuse not to pay to the participants.
What they don't know that they can't escape from this because if they don't pay the participants in this world, they will have to pay them in the next world after death, but no one understand this.  :(

Scammers don't believe on karma or punishment after death since many still do it so by saying this kind of word will not totally make them afraid since if they want to scam they will do it with no hesitation. Anyways this is incident is not new and somehow expected in this scene so maybe next time managers should do counter actions upon handling a campaign since this could possibly damage their reputation.

I have huge respect for Hhampuz he is a manager who will see to it that those who abide by the rules of his campaign will get paid, but there's a possibility that the developers did not meet the soft cap and Hhampuz is not holding the tokens and they just made a promise to Hhampuz that they will be the one to distribute, if you look on some bounty campaign of altcoin bounty managers are not the one holding the fund they just made a disclaimer on their announcement.

From the very beginning, experienced bounty hunters had to think about whether to participate where dozens of cheaters participate next to them. Just look how many cheaters caught YOSHIE in this bounty.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5373162.0

Now, the organizers can rightly say that they are not satisfied with the performance of the hunters. Although the hunters themselves consider the bounty to be hard work.
We need to get used to the fact that only one out of ten of these companies has a future. All non-payments can simply be called a common occurrence, and also a habit of hunters.
Therefore, no drama.

How come the experienced bounty hunters knew that cheaters are also participating in the campaign? Since they were detected, the company can refuse payments to those particular users, but there may be others who may be sincere and did not try to abuse the bounty. 

Anyways, the list of cheaters caught by YOSHIE is big one. They must be abusing other bounties too. Good that another farm of bounty cheaters was exposed and punished.

Bounty hunters are on three kinds of risks here, not getting paid because the crowdfunding is not successful, getting paid but the value of the token has gone down drastically before you received so from your projected hundred dollars of earnings you are down to a few pennies, getting paid early but the token never getting into the market, both bounty managers and bounty hunters are on the risk promoting crowdfunding in altcoins, we used to blame bounty managers for the failure of the projects but they are a third party and have nothing to do with the full development of the project.

I think as the bounty hunters cheaters (more than 100 base on YOSHIE's post) participated on the campaign is one of the reason not to pay to the participant. As the project team may think all the participant's are fake and they cant contribute anything for the project.

How much money did the investors gain from this campaign? and how is the project progress  ?
If they got a zero cents through their campaign then this logic seems reasonable but if they have gained some money because of the hard work of the remaining honest participants, they should have reward the serious bounty hunters.

I am not on the side of the investors and I have never communicated with the investors and also I have not researched about the project. I have given my opinion base on the post and the post of the alt account. Investors my collect fund by others way too, so it will be difficult to know either the campaign was successful or not. But they may say the issue of the alt account. I never think there was no positive result. There must have positive result for the campaign.

I was part of the campaign and I thought this one even though paying in alt will respect the participants as it is handled by reputable manager in the forum. However, this is a testament that even the BM has no clue if the dev team will respect the agreements or not. We have no idea if they collected funds for this project. But I already have the feeling that this may possibly fall to crap token because of weak foundation. In the end, it is indeed the bounty hunter's choice to accept all the terms as presented by the campaign.

Well, certainly a bad thing if the team refuses to pay for something they promised. if they were already dissatisfied they should have stopped the bounty program immediately.

But let, to be honest, how much bounty hunters really help the project? by that, I mean to introduce the already well-established method for bounty campaigns. here I am now going into that thread and randomly looking at a few reports. and what I find for example


short post quote (plus they added some hashtags, probably defined by campaign manager and campaign rules)

or following their #santa_coin hashtag https://twitter.com/hashtag/santa_coin?src=hashtag_click

So, can anyone say this is a promotion worth paying for? This is pure spam.
I personally have at least 3000 such posts reported to the moderator here on Bitcointalk forum and all of them are deleted.

Zero, nada, nilch. Bounty campaigns have absolutely no effect on a success of the altcoin projects. Maybe they had long time ago so all this is just a remnant of some different times, but at the moment its a sham.




This doesn't make you buy some of that shitcoin they are promoting? :D Joke aside, his is a good example of that "hard work" that we keep hearing about every time bounty hunters get rekted, like in this case.

Rule of thumb: every time you see some altcoin starting this kind of bounty campaign, you can be absolutely sure that they have no clue about marketing meaning altcoin will fail because let's be honest, 99.99% of the altcoins are only about marketing, nothing tangible.