With the exception of some special cases regarding the Blog/Media campaigns and one from the translations who did not get paid yet (we are working on both cases still), the Bounty Campaigns have been completed.
For those of you watching from the sidelines, other campaign managers, or are just interested in what we’ve been doing in regards to the Social Media Campaigns, here is an explanation.
At first we did a few random checks on the accounts that were taking part, whether or not they were actually taking part and just as importantly what other activities these accounts were doing. What we came across was a large scale coordinated scam attempt against Hash Rush and numerous other Bounty Campaigns here on Bitcointalk. One of the biggest alarm bells was that we actually noticed that a large amount of these accounts were retweeting identical content, (not similar, but the exact same) at the same time. After noticing these actions on the few accounts we checked at random, we decided to do a full audit on every entry and found that the pattern repeated itself, this is what lead to the large scale disqualifications on the Twitter and Facebook campaigns. We always knew that there might be some mistakes so the door was open to anyone that wanted a recheck to contact us and we would check it again, slowly, carefully and one by one. Unfortunately, even the requests at rechecking were riddled with scamming attempts.
To give our wider audience a good laugh here is a list of 'special case' accounts that we found - best of all these all were from the 'Please review me, I am an honest participant' group.
- Accounts that were blocked by Twitter, but the user did not check and wanted me to review their ‘seriously honest accounts’
- Twitter accounts that didn’t exist.
- An account that poses as porn stars (at least you selected a pretty good porn star to base your Facebook account on)
- Accounts with Jihadi material (seriously I want to be sarcastic about that, but this is a step too far)
- Accounts that were hacked (the original account was uploading images showing that her account was stolen, pretty much the same time that the account started to share Cryptocurrency news).
- One of my favorite: Accounts that had created multiple usergroups for their facebook profile so that when they shared Hash Rush and other Cryptocurrency news to their timeline, their real friends could not see them, but other people could. This was found out because a guy accidentally added the Hash Rush account to the 'block from seeing Crpyto news' group, he then tried to complain about not getting the bounty but without being able to see the shares I could not verify anything. A few minutes after informing him of this, his account magically changed and I could see all the Hash Rush and other Cryptocurrency shares.
- A group of 4 people who contacted me with accounts that were identical, I seriously thought I opened the same account accidentally until I saw the URL.
- People that I suspected of being bots, and were then found to be kicked out of other Social Media Bounties for the same reason.
A bit of information about Bounty Campaigns and a message for people that wanted to abuse themIn an ideal world you would understand that the idea behind a Bounty Campaign is so that news and information can be spread to other people, putting marketing in the hands of users and fans of the product, they in turn would be rewarded for their participation. Unfortunately, when you start to make accounts that are automated, share everything without thinking, are followed by thousands of other bots or simply share and hide the content from the very people that we want to reach - then it is worthless. It does not matter whether you have 5000 friends or followers, it's actually worse that you'd go out of your way to cheat the system further by getting fake social media statistics, for many people that mentioned "how can I be a bot, I have 4k followers" well when most of them are banned, dummy accounts or bot accounts themselves, it's still abusing the Bounty Campaign system. Furthermore, quoting twitter audit is quite useless as that thing is far to easy to fool and will regularly give totally incorrect results.
With the general information out of the way, the message would be, you can now cry about HR being a scam but the fact of the matter is that honest bounty participants have been paid out (etherscan and the happy recipients are there to prove that). We will continue to fix issues that were due to us (blog people, sorry about that, and one of our translators that didn't get paid yet, you will also be paid soon) and most importantly a product where your hard earned Rush Coins can be used will be released, finally we will endeavour, as we always have, to keep interested parties up to date on our progress.
With all the explanations done, I’d like to give a special shout out to the honest people that were backing the project and supported us during the campaigns. With your help Hash Rush was very well funded and we really want to thank you.
You will also be very happy to know that we have not been sitting back doing nothing and that the game has been in production/being coded for a while now. We will have an announcement soon for a pre-alpha release and even some competitions for you to get access to the pre-alpha if you do not automatically qualify for access. Finally I’m sure that people will ask, we are working to be listed on an exchange, more news will come on that soon.
