This is a stupid, trolly response and you’re not contributing anything productive to the situation. ~
That's because he is a stupid troll.
I’ve been a loyal site user for years, probably 5 or 6 years at this point, and I used to talk to the site owner in this very thread when he posted here regularly and even made suggestions to the RP program that he runs that he has adopted. I’ve always thought of this site as the gold standard for faucet-based websites. But confiscating external deposits is a huge black mark on the site’s reputation and that of the owner. If there is cause to make a fraud claim, it would be justified to seize any faucet and interest earnings, but not external deposits. The fact that there is such an unsatisfactory explanation for this should concern anyone who has deposited funds on the site.
I think you are looking at this the wrong way. We have a responsibility to our honest customers to protect their deposits. When someone signs up multiple accounts to steal from the faucet and referral program that is your money they are taking. If I was to give them back the funds they deposited to unlock playing without captcha they would just do it again.
Again, taking for granted this is what actually happened, seizing deposits isn’t warranted. It creates an incentive for you to come to this conclusion because you’re monetarily incentivized to reach that conclusion. It’s more problematic because you control all the evidence and everyone has to take you at your word for this. So again, it’s a huge reputational risk and a very poor policy in my own opinion to have a policy to seize deposits.
Is there even a TOS clause that says you can seize all funds including external deposits if suspected of cheating? If so, you may be technically in the right and the only risk is to your reputation (again because you’re incentivized to reach that conclusion) but if there’s no TOS clause that states that, I think this is very clearly unjustified.
You’re in a tough spot for sure, I have no doubt people constantly try to scam what they can out of these free faucets. I don’t quite understand the point of paying interest on external deposits anyway. Banks do that because they make money on the funds they loan, but I don’t understand what the site does with funds that allows them to make more money on deposits than they pay out in interest, and because this isn’t clear, it lends more credence to the possibility that something is a miss, and seizing deposits is one way to keep the program afloat.
*edit: I see now you published some evidence since since my last post of the IP logs of sign up. This definitely helps prove the faucet scam aspect, and I agree with you there. It seems clear there was fraud. My only issue is the TOS at this point. If you’ve had a clause that says fraud forfeits all funds on the site, including external deposits, I think you’re justified in seizing the them. It’s not what I’d like to see, but that’s your call as site operator. Without the clause though, and I don’t know myself whether there has been one or not, I think you should return the deposits and ban all IP addresses involved. And update the TOS immediately in that case.
