Does stealing efforts = scam ? need opinion

[mikeywith]

 I don't really know much about the bounty stuff , but this MENAPAY ICO came to attention after a member of the Arabic board asked about it


I am not a fan of this ICO thing at all, but thought i would do him a favor with a quick research so i found this accusation against Menapay ico.


after reading the full story, i came to check Menapay feedback and found nothing against them , the bounty thread was self-moderated with "(10 posts by 10 users deleted.)" so couldn't really count on it.

so i took a step further and visited their official telegram group, picked a random guy from the chat ( most of them were asking about the rewards and why is it taking so long) and he confirmed what's written in the article by publish0x.com team here > https://www.publish0x.com/bounty0x/menapay-transparency-report-xggyr

took another step and talked to the group admin and he admitted that they did change the rules after the bounty was finished, so while bounty hunters were waiting for their tokens, they expect them to go back and do more (NEW) work for them which is downloading their app and leaving a review for the app !


I have to say that i don't like all these bounty hunters as most of them spam to get some worthless coins/tokens, most of them do this shit with many accounts, but still some people must have put a lot of effort into this shit and they got scammed for their efforts.


I went ahead and tagged their account because I believe they scammed bounty hunters by changing the rules after the hunters finished their tasks, in an attempt to not pay the hunters.

i would like to hear community review on this.

[Avirunes]

Yes changing bounty rules afterwards is wrong. Bounty participants participant agreed to participate on the basis of earlier rules not the new ones.

You did right by going ahead and placing a negative feedback. Will support by placing mine on their profile as well.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Not a fan of bounties too but 28 weeks(7 months) of doing bounty tasks then you receive nothing because of last minute rule changes?
I would be mad too and feel scammed because I will have invested a lot of my time and internet for the tasks.

I think you are right to tag them. Bounty thread is locked and self-moderated. So we won't be able to see complaints in the thread.

[yahoo62278]

100% correct to tag the company and all accounts associated. The company and the manager agreed upon terms when releasing the bounty. They(the company) have 0 right to change the terms once the bounty is over.

If the manager knew they were gonna change the terms and said nothing, he should also be tagged.

Sad thing is the account is online right now but has not posted since March 9th. The ICO is over as well so they will likely just go about business as usual and pay no attention to the tags. We will see though.

[The Cryptovator]

Yes, you did right thing. Change bounty rules after end of bounty campaign they are cheating with peoples. In that case the team deserve negative feedback including BM unless he/she announce scam him self. Bounty managers should not support team if they ask to change rules after end of campaign.

If team try to force BM to change rules after end of campaign the he/she should announce them as a scammer, so perhaps we will know that MB isn't supporting team at least for scam hunters.    

[o_e_l_e_o]

Yup, agreed. In any other walk of life unilaterally changing a contract and withholding pay after the work was done and the original contract fulfilled would be illegal. Unfortunately, these scammers will get away with it and no doubt disappear with their ICO funding just like almost every other ICO.

You are right to tag them.

[TalkStar]

You are completely right on your decission IMO. Changing rules after ending bounty campaign is nothing but a scam. Its a complete commitment breakup and participants will not get their exact return for their bounty work.

I am not agree with them who believe that joining bounties are useless now. There was a time participating on bounty was so much popular but day by day these scammers make the situation worse. As a result Community users dare to join this kinda bounties.   

[khaled0111]

What I find really irritating when I read the conversation is how he is trying to find exuses for what they did. Pascal an d Deniz tryed to explain to him that what he is doing is wrong but in vain.
Obviously, they had the intention to scam bounty hunters from the beginning:


Also, I didn't like his arrogance and talking about bounty hunters as they were slaves.

There is a lot to say about how bounty hunters are negatively affecting the forum, but this does not give you the right to exploit them.
They, absolutely, deserve the red tag.

[Patatas]

Usually, tagging bounty or ICO related accounts is not worth it at all. The bounty hunters are spammers and account farmers themselves, they don't really care about investigating the bounty team or whatever before joining them. The bounty manager hired by the team is fuck-all and not experienced. Everyone is equally involved. In the above case, if the bounty manager had mentioned that he can change the rules during the bounty and the participants agreed to it, then it makes sense otherwise it doesn't.

[1miau]

Menapay's ICO was also discussed in our German local board because the project was presented on a famous altcoin blog and therefore the number of participants in the bounty was relatively high. After reading it, my intention was originally also to give them a negative tag but I decided to wait how the whole issue would continue after their release of the final spreadsheet. (they don't have released it yet, even after 8 weeks (!!!!) of "checking" it.) Token distribution is planned for May 16.
That's why I left no red tag yet although there is far more than enough shady shit to tag them already.

took another step and talked to the group admin and he admitted that they did change the rules after the bounty was finished, so while bounty hunters were waiting for their tokens, they expect them to go back and do more (NEW) work for them which is downloading their app and leaving a review for the app !

Correct, in addition to add more work by Menapay after everything was ended I see this as blackmailing the users to leave a five-star-rating (the best one) for the app, otherwise they don't get their bounty tokens. That's similar to buy reputation for Menapay and has nothing to do with ratings left for a legitimate reason because the users are forced to do it and if they won't do it, they don't receive rewards for their work.

I'm almost sure that was planned, it would be no problem to include the rules in the bounty rules from the beginning and before the users join they see the rules. Otherwise, rules make no sense if I add some of them after the campaign.  
Another thing is that the App didn't really work for many when they had to download it, there were so many complaints about it how buggy the App was. But that only as a side-note.  

I have to say that i don't like all these bounty hunters as most of them spam to get some worthless coins/tokens, most of them do this shit with many accounts, but still some people must have put a lot of effort into this shit and they got scammed for their efforts.

If they really care for honest participants they would have added better rules before or hired a professional manager and not managing it "in-house" for the Bitcointalk part. It's clear to me that they were only interested to get as much as possible free (spam) advertising from everyone and remove as much as possible users later.

I went ahead and tagged their account because I believe they scammed bounty hunters by changing the rules after the hunters finished their tasks, in an attempt to not pay the hunters.

i would like to hear community review on this.

I will also tag them and remove my tag only if they distribute the tokens like stated in the original rules. Thanks for bringing up the issue here.  

[rhomelmabini]

That's too much red flag for me, though they have the authority to change everything on rules of the bounty but I guess it is still unethical if there will be another work to be added for all bounty participants and yet a penny will just be given for them. It's better to tag them and hoping those bounty participants will do so too to stop it not just being a martyr over shitty ICOs like that.

[mikeywith]

Correct, in addition to add more work by Menapay after everything was ended I see this as blackmailing the users to leave a five-star-rating (the best one) for the app, otherwise they don't get their bounty tokens. That's similar to buy reputation for Menapay and has nothing to do with ratings left for a legitimate reason because the users are forced to do it and if they won't do it, they don't receive rewards for their work.

The word "blackmailing" is what i missed in the OP, this is exactly what this whole thing is about , if you read the chat between the bounty manager and the ICO team, the ICO team's excuse was that they wanted to verify the existence of the bounty hunters, assuming that many of them could have been bots or what he refers to as "dead people".

the funny thing is, downloading an app is an easy task for a bot, if they wanted to confirm the existence of the hunters there could have been better ways of doing this, but your theory makes sense, they want those "fake/forced/bought" 5 stars rating on their worthless piece of shit app.

[1miau]

Correct, in addition to add more work by Menapay after everything was ended I see this as blackmailing the users to leave a five-star-rating (the best one) for the app, otherwise they don't get their bounty tokens. That's similar to buy reputation for Menapay and has nothing to do with ratings left for a legitimate reason because the users are forced to do it and if they won't do it, they don't receive rewards for their work.

The word "blackmailing" is what i missed in the OP, this is exactly what this whole thing is about , if you read the chat between the bounty manager and the ICO team, the ICO team's excuse was that they wanted to verify the existence of the bounty hunters, assuming that many of them could have been bots or what he refers to as "dead people".

Yes, looks like Menapay isn't very interested in a healthy communication. 

Maybe it's a little bit confusing how Menapay managed their ICO marketing, they had 2 different bounties:

- one of them was managed by bounty0x, a special bounty website for managing various bounties (third party, not related to Menapay) (here (tasks not visible because bounty is ended))
- the other one was managed on Bitcointalk in-house by Menapay (here)

And Menapay is responsible to sent the funds for both bounties. bounty0x has checked the work for the bounty0x part and of that checked part Menapay wants only to pay 3% of the bounty hunters (111 from 3000 participants).
The result of the bounty on Bitcointalk is not known yet.
For both campaigns the extra-work was added.

the funny thing is, downloading an app is an easy task for a bot, if they wanted to confirm the existence of the hunters there could have been better ways of doing this, but your theory makes sense, they want those "fake/forced/bought" 5 stars rating on their worthless piece of shit app.

It's getting ridiculous how projects are trying to cheat the most helpless people to save costs...

[Lauda]

It's a scam and I've tagged it as such.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

so while bounty hunters were waiting for their tokens, they expect them to go back and do more (NEW) work for them which is downloading their app and leaving a review for the app !

Since most of these ICOs are run by scammers looking to steal money from investors, it should come as no surprise to anyone that they pull shit like this with their bounty participants.  These are not inherently honest people we're dealing with, so nobody should expect them to stand by their word when they hire bounty hunters to advertise for them.

I have to say that i don't like all these bounty hunters as most of them spam to get some worthless coins/tokens, most of them do this shit with many accounts, but still some people must have put a lot of effort into this shit and they got scammed for their efforts.

I don't care how much effort they put in.  I have very little sympathy for people who are essentially spammers, which is what bounty hunters are.  If they weren't promoting ICOs with all of their multiple alt accounts, they'd be sending phishing and Nigerian prince-type scam e-mails or other related nonsense. 

And no matter how many times they get scammed by these ICOs, they still keep coming back for more--they're stupid and they're obviously unable to learn from their mistakes.  I have a problem when a legitimate bitcoin-paying signature campaign manager doesn't pay his participants (like Lightlord/Lutpin a few months ago), but I'm not going to shed any tears over some bounty hunters when they get screwed.  They're a cancer on this forum.

[mikeywith]

@The Pharmacist

It is not about who is the victim, it is about the criminal , even if a scammer scammed another scammer, are you going to give him a pass because the victim is not worthy of symphaty ? I don't think you will.

Let alone the fact there is no way those 3000+ hunters were spammers, there must have been 10 or 20 semi-good posters.


 

[erikalui]

Definitely! A company that doesn't pay its employees and campaigns that do not pay their participants are scammers. You can't change rules as you wish but sad thing is here they are not legally bound by any agreement while if you are not paid by a company, you have a legal right. Another case like Tokenpay.

[Harlot]

If we look at how obligations and contracts works then they absolutely have violated their own terms by changing the requirements as soon as the bounty ended. The point is the bounty hunters have obviously done their part and expected for a payment in exchange for their efforts they aren't aware of this additional requirements while the campaign is ongoing and the bounty manager pretty soon afterwards have made this requirement. Surely this is some kind of trap for bounty hunters are forced to do in order to get the payments they should have received with no questions ask.

[TECSHARE]

I would say a negative rating is warranted in this case. This is what is called theft of services. If a guy comes to your house and patches your roof and you tell him to fuck off he cant just take your roof with him, so he will call the police and have you charged with theft of services. This is functionally the same concept. Additionally once they confirmed you as being in the program with a set terms of service/exchange they created a binding contract. Unless they explicitly have an exemption allowing the terms to be changed at any time they are liable for payment.

[1miau]

MenaScam, part II

Today, the team has released the final bounty spreadsheet from their bitcointalk bounty and they are truly talented when it comes to changing the rules afterwards to deceive people: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rWGEHnwahq7REx0kLCJ2sY54cuneaTa2onAirTrwrv0/edit#gid=1999922025

In total, they promised to allocate 500,000$ in Menapay tokens for the bounty (archive) but only distributed around 109,500$ (662.000 Menapay x 0,165$/Menapay) because they lowered the allocation for some parts of the bounty:

- Translation allocation was reduced
- A part of the Telegram campaign was reduced
- The signature campaign was reduced that every participant got not more than a maximum than 2,000 Menapay. (the duration of the campaign was more than a half year (28 weeks) and some members got over 10,000 Menapay according the initial rules but were now reduced to 2,000. That's easily to prove by comparing the signature spreadsheet vs the total distribution spreadsheet

They wrote in the Telegram that the remaining funds will be used for future bounties / airdrops and act totally innocent. 
My conclusion: red trust is well deserved.