Hello community!
One of the problems we have in the faucet industry is
bots, or more specifically
fraudulent activity which causes faucet owners to
lose their money quicker than they should. This is usually done by the same person
claiming more from the same faucet using various methods. It's one of the biggest challenges for faucet owners (and the whole world) to identify individual users with only a bitcoin address and ip address. Without using any personal information there is no way to pin point a fraudulent user
before they do it. Even with personal information, this does not stop them from committing the activity.
Services exist like nastyhosts and getipintel to detect "bad IPs" and can be used to protect faucets, however this system tends to report more false positives when legitimate users (especially in the bitcoin industry) choose to use a VPN or proxy for their everyday activities. While it's mostly true that if someone is going to perform abusive activities they tend to hide their IP, this is not a 100% sure fire method to catch people.
The beginning of FaucetHub's Anti-Fraud systemAs you know, when I announced FaucetHUB on the forums, I also announced a "anti-bot" feature would be developed for it.
FaucetHub launched on December 1st, 2016.
Since then our database collected a lot of IPs, addresses & e-mails from users who use faucets on our network. Most importantly we collected a lot of
fraudulent activity as well.
For all Faucet Owners who have chosen to use FaucetHub as their wallet, you may have already noticed the statistics we provide in the Faucet Manager. Along with the basics we have a unique feature to
group payouts by user. This tab shows the total paid to each individual user, and how many of their addresses on their FH account they used on your faucet. This allows faucet owners to
spot multi-address abuse and ban the associated IPs and coin addresses from their sites. This kind of information can only be provided by FaucetHub's reports.
From now on this "anti-bot" feature will be called "anti-fraud", and this was only the start.
What exactly do we consider to be fraudulent activity?We consider fraud to be any kind of activity which harms faucet owners. Any activity which a faucet owner would not approve of a user doing on their site:
Referral abuseSelf-referring yourself on faucets with multiple addresses to boost your gains. This one is the easiest types of fraud for any user to perform, and equally the hardest to detect by any faucet owner. This is considered to be FRAUD by FaucetHub.
Multi-address abuseUsing multiple addresses which are added to your FaucetHub account, and then claiming on the same faucet to get more than you should and bypass any limits they set on their faucets. With or without using scripts or multiple IPs this is considered to be FRAUD by FaucetHub.
Multi-accounts abuseCreating multiple accounts on FaucetHub and claiming from the same faucets 1-2 times on each, then moving on to another account to do the same thing. This is another form of
Multi-address abuse and is much harder to detect. It's considered to be FRAUD by FaucetHub and when detected will result in the same penalties.
These are 3 of the most common types of faucet fraud which end up
bleeding faucet owners dry of all their funds, and most of the time
they have no idea.
Thanks to the Anti-Fraud "group by user" statistics that I mentioned earlier you can see users who are doing
Multi-address abuse and act upon their accounts on your site. But let's face the facts; you don't want to worry about botters and fraudsters every day. You don't want babysit your faucet forever. So we came up with a solution to help
protect faucet owners balances.
FaucetHub Transparent Anti-Fraud SystemThe system is designed to
directly combat fraud committed by users on faucet's using our platform, and
recover stolen funds and send them back to the faucet owners. We do not profit in any way from this system, the funds are
refunded 100% to where they belong, providing they were not already withdrawn. We chose the name "transparent" because we do all the work on the FaucetHub side
regardless of your faucet script or website. To benefit from this system
no additional code is needed on your site.
The system has been rolled out slowly and is live since last night. It caught 50-60 users so far, some of which have committed some very large offences.
An important message to users who were/will get caughtSome users who were caught "didn't know" that abusing a site via any of the above mentioned fraud methods is "wrong".
Those users also don't think that FaucetHUB should be the one stopping them from taking away their coins.
We want to make sure everyone understands,
FaucetHUB runs faucets as well, so we will be active and make sure
no faucet owner from our network loses 1 single satoshi to people who think they can simply abuse our sites. "I didn't think it was wrong" is not an excuse. If you gain more than you should, think twice about what you were doing. Users who were doing this
have had their accounts frozen and will not be paid. This stands for all users who were caught last night and all who get caught from this point onwards.
The "Fraud Report" in more detailUsers who get caught will be "frozen". This blocks any of their addresses from receiving a payout and they are not able to make any claims using them. When they access FaucetHub they will see a message. At the bottom of that page is the Fraud Report. Here's an example from 1 user who thinks he did nothing wrong and should be allowed to continue using FaucetHUB:
- Caught doing fraudulent activities 34 times, last checked Just now.
- They have 51 coin addresses linked to their account of which 25 were used to make 352 faucet claims.
- Found doing multiple address claims on 1 faucets using 23 coin addresses.
- Found doing referral address fraud on 4 faucets a total of 15 times.
- Has been linked to 103 other accounts via IP address at least once (IPs won't be displayed here)
We show all the relevant numbers to users who got frozen.
What FaucetHUB is providing you is an end to your loss of coins which a minority abuses. This minority most of the time is able to claim/"earn" more than 100 normal users would do in a day.
If you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer them through
SUPPORT ON SITE/CHAT ON SITE.
This forum or any other forum is considered as a marketing TOOL to PROMOTE projects. All of us faucet owners post our projects on many forums and we're not able to babysit forums for individual posts. You have 99.99% bigger chance to get a reply in 5 minutes to e-mails than on any forum.
Thanks for your attention, Merry Christmas, New Year, etc.
