Bounty campaign is becoming absolutely useless.

[mosprognoz]

One of my friends launched a project and of course the bounty campaign was started too. After checking statistic via google analytics I found out that traffic coming from  Twitter + Instagram + Facebook = less than 3 % of total traffic.. I decided to try scammers method myself. Here is what I did.

1. Bought Twitter account with 2 000 followers for $ 10 (https://accsmarket.com/en/catalog/twitter/boosted) I was sure that twitter Audit will be less than 50% because followers are mainly bots. But twitter audit showed 87% and that was more than enough to enter any bounty campaign here on bitcointalk.

2. Same thing with Instagram. Account with 5 000 followers for  $10

3. Same with Facebook account.

4. Bought BTK account (member) for $50 (A lot of Russian scammers are selling accounts in the Russian board called "Baraholka" ) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=236.0 Prices are starting from $10 for Jr account and $800 for Legendary.


Do not buy accounts from the sources that I mentioned, because it is illegal.

As you can see, I could enter any bounty campaign, having all accounts mentioned above.

I'm sure that more than 50% of bounty participants are using the same scam scheme, for cheating. All this means, that a lot of  bounty campaign participants are advertising your project to bots... How is it possible that you have about 1000 participants in each bounty campaign.(about 3 000 in total) and you get less than 3% of the traffic to your project website ? And registered users are less than 0.5% I think it is much more better to allow only full members and above to participate in your campaign and even that will not guarantee you good results. Just 20-30 real account with real followers will do a much more better job.

[ankit10]

For your kind information buying forums account is not allowed and is considered as scam/spam. You can create multiple accounts but you can not use all accounts to join in one campaign.
Bounty campaigns are becoming useless because there are lots of scam project. And sometimes because of BOunty managers. Mostly "good" bounty managers check types of followers participants has.
When campaign asks users to retweet or share or tweet on any social media platform they use "#" like #Crypto. It means tweets are seen or target to crypto users only.
So now if any bounty manager is not checking followers of users or participants then its BM's fault. (they don't need to check all of them just a few of them).
For example, any campaign has 500 social media participants and all of them has 200 followers (average) and they publish 1 post per day and it was seen/impression by 500 people. 200x500= 100,000 impression each day. Now it depends on the project and "#" used.
Only interested people will click on links and open their website.

[ankit10]

4. Bought BTK account (member) for $50 (A lot of Russian scammers are selling accounts in the Russian board called "Baraholka" ) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=236.0 Prices are starting from $10 for Jr account and $800 for Legendary.

Just quoted if any user interested in finding those Bought accounts. You should report this to DT members they will surely
give red trust them and those who bought.

[mosprognoz]

For your kind information buying forums account is not allowed and is considered as scam/spam. You can create multiple accounts but you can not use all accounts to join in one campaign.

Really? Thanks a lot for informing me... Dude, I am fighting scams almost two years on this forum, and I know the rules very well. I already warned people to do not buy accounts from the sources mentioned above, because it is illegal. Read the topic more carefully please.

Just quoted if any user interested in finding those Bought accounts. You should report this to DT members they will surely
give red trust them and those who bought.

Almost all account sellers in that board are already tagged. Thank you again for your "suggestions"

So now if any bounty manager is not checking followers of users or participants then its BM's fault.

It is impossible to check if around 1 million followers of bounty participants are real or not. As I mentioned even twitter audit could not determine bots in followers. That is the main problem which I would like to discuss here. Once again. Please read the topic more carefully.

[ovcijisir]

One of my friends launched a project and of course the bounty campaign was started too. After checking statistic via google analytics I found out that traffic coming from  Twitter + Instagram + Facebook = less than 3 % of total traffic.. I decided to try scammers method myself. Here is what I did.

Did you measure the traffic from Bitcointalk?

Did your friend check the accounts that applied to campaign? I believe that bounty managers should be more selective about accepting people in campaigns.

I believe that accounts that have less then 90% of real users on Twitter can be considered low quality accounts.

[mosprognoz]

One of my friends launched a project and of course the bounty campaign was started too. After checking statistic via google analytics I found out that traffic coming from  Twitter + Instagram + Facebook = less than 3 % of total traffic.. I decided to try scammers method myself. Here is what I did.

Did you measure the traffic from Bitcointalk?

Did your friend check the accounts that applied to campaign?

I believe that accounts that have less then 90% of real users on Twitter can be considered low quality accounts.

No, we checked the traffic from twitter, Facebook and Instagram. All together are less than 3% of the whole traffic. It was impossible to check almost 3 000 accounts of bounty participants. Some campaigns are accepting twitter audit that is not less than 85%.   

[ovcijisir]

The problem is that usually there is no selection of bounty candidates.

There are huge bot farms that spam useless junk posts and those accounts are getting the same payment as regular / high quality posters.

The impact of bounty campaigns would be bigger if there would be less bounty hunters that have high quality accounts that spread good and useful content.

[mosprognoz]

The problem is that usually there is no selection of bounty candidates.

There are huge bot farms that spam useless junk posts and those accounts are getting the same payment as regular / high quality posters.

The impact of bounty campaigns would be bigger if there would be less bounty hunters that have high quality accounts that spread good and useful content.

That's what I'm talking about. Less bounty hunters, but with real followers that are interested in crypto is much more better choice. Merit is coming your way.

[ankit10]

The problem is that usually there is no selection of bounty candidates.

There are huge bot farms that spam useless junk posts and those accounts are getting the same payment as regular / high quality posters.

The impact of bounty campaigns would be bigger if there would be less bounty hunters that have high quality accounts that spread good and useful content.

That's what I'm talking about. Less bounty hunters, but with real followers that are interested in crypto is much more better choice. Merit is coming your way.

Still, bounty managers need to check followers of participants and maybe, mostly bounty managers like yahoo do.
They put requirements like minimum required followers which helps their campaigns too boost.

[ovcijisir]

The problem is that usually there is no selection of bounty candidates.

There are huge bot farms that spam useless junk posts and those accounts are getting the same payment as regular / high quality posters.

The impact of bounty campaigns would be bigger if there would be less bounty hunters that have high quality accounts that spread good and useful content.

That's what I'm talking about. Less bounty hunters, but with real followers that are interested in crypto is much more better choice. Merit is coming your way.

Thanks

One more thing I wanted to share - just for you to grasp the scale of the problem look at this thread. This address gathered over 40000 $ worth of tokens (they sent out some tokens so its less now).

There are some addresses that gain huge profit in bounty campaigns and scammers won't stop until there is profit for them.

I think that bounty managers should have mutual black list of users and accounts and update it regularly.

[mosprognoz]

The problem is that usually there is no selection of bounty candidates.

There are huge bot farms that spam useless junk posts and those accounts are getting the same payment as regular / high quality posters.

The impact of bounty campaigns would be bigger if there would be less bounty hunters that have high quality accounts that spread good and useful content.

That's what I'm talking about. Less bounty hunters, but with real followers that are interested in crypto is much more better choice. Merit is coming your way.

Still, bounty managers need to check followers of participants and maybe, mostly bounty managers like yahoo do.
They put requirements like minimum required followers which helps their campaigns too boost.

yahoo62278 is the best and highest paid bounty manager. Not everybody can afford such bounty manager. Anyway, the fact is that paid advertising on LinkedIn and other sources that are still allowing crypto advertising is much more better option I guess.

[mosprognoz]

The problem is that usually there is no selection of bounty candidates.

There are huge bot farms that spam useless junk posts and those accounts are getting the same payment as regular / high quality posters.

The impact of bounty campaigns would be bigger if there would be less bounty hunters that have high quality accounts that spread good and useful content.

That's what I'm talking about. Less bounty hunters, but with real followers that are interested in crypto is much more better choice. Merit is coming your way.

Thanks

One more thing I wanted to share - just for you to grasp the scale of the problem look at this thread. This address gathered over 40000 $ worth of tokens (they sent out some tokens so its less now).

There are some addresses that gain huge profit in bounty campaigns and scammers won't stop until there is profit for them.

I think that bounty managers should have mutual black list of users and accounts and update it regularly.

Yes I know. Some dudes are making a lot of money by cheating bounty campaigns.

[Patatas]

One of my friends launched a project and of course the bounty campaign was started too. After checking statistic via google analytics I found out that traffic coming from  Twitter + Instagram + Facebook = less than 3 % of total traffic.. I decided to try scammers method myself. Here is what I did.

Doesn't that depend on how effectively your product is promoted on these platforms? I think the chances of your product getting marketed better is by using the sponsored adds.

I'm sure that more than 50% of bounty participants are using the same scam scheme, for cheating. All this means, that a lot of  bounty campaign participants are advertising your project to bots... How is it possible that you have about 1000 participants in each bounty campaign.(about 3 000 in total) and you get less than 3% of the traffic to your project website ? And registered users are less than 0.5% I think it is much more better to allow only full members and above to participate in your campaign and even that will not guarantee you good results. Just 20-30 real account with real followers will do a much more better job.

You're right. There is no such thing as a legit bounty hunter. They simply can't survive from bounties if they just use one account for posting hence they all have a bot army to harness the profits. 90% of the bounty farmers are cheaters and human bots.

[mosprognoz]

Doesn't that depend on how effectively your product is promoted on these platforms? I think the chances of your product getting marketed better is by using the sponsored adds.

I'm not sure if Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are still allowing sponsored adds that are related to crypto. As I know, all them including Google and YouTube banned crypto adds. Only LinkedIn, Qzone and Reddit are still OK with it I guess.

[stomachgrowls]

Since this do talks about bounty campaigns then this would be appropriate to be moved on Altcoin discussions.What yah think?
Im not surprised with this thing since this do already happen when bounty era has started.There would be always a cheater who would done things
as long they do took advantage among others.Buying out accounts is part of that and thats why good and reputable managers should be considered
to handle out some bounty campaigns that do knows how to filter out things,it might not be perfect but somehow it can lessen up abusers.
For results or traffic, each marketing medium wont give you assurance to give positive outcomes.

[Patatas]

Doesn't that depend on how effectively your product is promoted on these platforms? I think the chances of your product getting marketed better is by using the sponsored adds.

I'm not sure if Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are still allowing sponsored adds that are related to crypto. As I know, all them including Google and YouTube banned crypto adds. Only LinkedIn, Qzone and Reddit are still OK with it I guess.

YouTube is allowing it for sure and so does Facebook as long as the product complies with their terms and conditions. Legit ICO's are still allowed I suppose but I don't know for sure. Reddit is okay with it because they make the least out of all the platforms through adds. It's crazy how facebook doesn't allow ICO adds but it's totally acceptable to share posts regarding the same.

[dropthebomb.io]

So far according to our experience, YouTube's traffic is the best. Bounties... well yes. It will not make a big deal for a project.

[elda34b]

I think ICO projects know it well and some of them maybe don't care about it at all. They don't give 'real money', just some tokens created out of nowhere. So there's no problem for them even if they give that to bots. But some project that I know of implement a very strict requirement, leaving a very small bounty hunter to get rewards after verification which is good, but not all project did this. Some of them even went as far as accepting plagiarized translation from Google translate. Bleh.

[nutildah]

A while back I helped coordinate an ICO and I noticed the same thing:

- hardly any traffic being directed from social media, even less than what you saw
- upon inspection of the social media profiles, 100% of them used fake friend/followers/subscribers/etc
- the bounty campaign manager did an absurdly poor job with quality control and was probably in on trying to milk as many tokens as he could
- the blog posters was an absolute joke: every single one was just a copy/paste job from content on the website or in the white paper

I really don't understand why anybody uses bounty hunters any more. Of course they will insist they are of the utmost importance, but in reality they contribute very little. Needless to say I became even less impressed with the profession than I already was.

[Yaunfitda]

^^ Exactly. I really don't know when the bounty started with all this social media campaigns because I just know that signature campaigns was one of the most effective tools to market a project.

But it seems you really proves that bounty hunters doesn't have any significant effect to the campaigns and probably 90% are really cheating, using multiple accounts etc. And the OP exposed how the scam actual works so I don't know if ICO or projects can read this board but this should be a eye opener for them.