Bounty Scammers, Why Do We Care?

[DaveF]

Starting with there are a lots of people putting in a lot of hard work tracking down the 100s of bounty scammers out there.
lovesmayfamilis, YOSHIE, and all the others are putting in hours of work tracking these people down.

Now...why do we as a group care?
Looking at the "quality" of the work that most of these scammers put out if the bounty managers want to pay for that crap then let them pay.
It's hurting the projects, but the better projects will want better posts / tweets / etc.
The crap is well...crap, let them use crap posters, who give them crap and then they can pay with their crap tokens. Let them all play in their piles of crap.

Or am I just that burn out and tired of dealing the with the 1 list shit posts around here.

-Dave

*Full disclosure if you are reading this some time in the future, I am wearing a paid sig with I post this, but I like to think I'm not posting crap....

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[suchmoon]

The unfortunate consequence of all that bounty shit is that we have to wade through it in order to find something worthwhile to read on this forum. If the bounty abuse happened mostly on the bounty board I wouldn't be too worried but unfortunately it spills all over the place. Incapacitating a bounty abuser saves hours of work for post reporters and moderators.

Granted it would be far more effective to hold bounty managers to some sort of a standard but that's been discussed numerous times without a viable solution.

[YOSHIE]

• Don't know how many people that were rescued from Alt who committed the fraud.
• Don't know how many Alt accounts have been destroyed.
• Don't know how many Bounty managers have been helped to save time and be cleared of fraud.
• Don't know how many fraudulent Alt accounts have broken the rules on this forum.

accounts alt if clarified or given the true meaning, the effect of all they have done is "bigger loss" to other members, especially managers, forums and companies.

Case:
• Alt's account was involved in a sale, by 1 or 2 years later, the selling party claimed the account was hacked, Members who have spent money, get red and the account cannot be used anymore, then, who gains and who loses.
• manipulate, trap, and take other members' media accounts to participate in the bounty for their own benefit.
• Alt accounts can commit fraud in trading goods.
• Cheating Alt accounts, often misuse Merit, to be able to participate in bounties or be sold.
• Alt that evades ban.
• And many other cases.

For other reasons:
• PM: certain managers requested help disclosing how many Alt accounts in the campaign they managed.
• In fact, companies and campaign managers do not want to pay if there are accounts that cheat in their campaigns, It's just that they will do it when the campaign is over, if they get a cheat Alt account.
• if it is not disclosed in public at a later date, those Alt who are cheating will do negative and detrimental things, especially to the forum and other parties and various cases.

These two rules are quite helpful for all parties, including managers and forums.

25. Ban evasion (using or creating accounts while one of your accounts is banned) is not allowed.[e]

Fourth: Permanent ban

Your first ban is your first warning. If you have to be banned for a fourth time it is permanent and you will no longer be allowed to participate on the forum under any accounts. Note: If you are banned on one account then you are not allowed to post under any accounts you own for the duration of your ban. The only exception to this rule is Meta where you can discuss the circumstances of your ban if you wish to do so but anywhere outside of that sub will be considered ban evasion and will get your ban doubled, but it is generally best to just patiently wait out your ban and improve your posts on return and hopefully no further bans will be needed.

Not yet with other written rules.

In essence: Alt account who wants to cheat "Harm many parties in this forum".

So, even though it takes a long time, the cheating Alt must be burned, the cheating Alt not only harms the company, but also harms the Bitcointalk Forum and other parties.

[lovesmayfamilis]

Do you know what happens if you allow cheaters to spawn their farms on the forum? Yesterday I found more than 10 accounts opened within two hours. And they were all newbies, they took part in the bounty. And while they are newbies, they would soon grow to a higher rank. Now multiply how many "good" messages would you see in the future if they all went to write to subscription companies in line? And how many seats will they take from normal people? It was only two hours in which these accounts were created.
I am more than sure that if we do not prevent this cheating, then whoever creates 10 accounts will become even greedier. After all, if there are no barriers, then there is always little.. And it will spawn even more multi-accounts. And he will also tell all his friends about such a scheme. Etc.
What I'm wasting time on should only bother me, right?Therefore, I think it would be more appropriate to just say "thank you" to those who do it, and not worry about our time.

[Rikafip]

Even though catching bounty abusers might seem like a Sisyphus work/whack-a-mole as once you tag them they will simply abandon that account and create the new one and continue with the same practice, I can see at least one instant benefit; since bounty awards are stake based, more people join the campaign means that less tokens each member will get, and by removing the abusers those legit bounty hunters who are abiding the rules will get more tokens. Majority of bounty hunters probably have alts that are not discovered yet, but I like to think that there must be a certain percentage of those that are not abusing the rules and are playing by the book.

Granted it would be far more effective to hold bounty managers to some sort of a standard but that's been discussed numerous times without a viable solution.

If bounty managers are really interested in reducing the amount of bounty abuse and get somewhat legit members they would set at least Jr Member as a minimum requirement to join the campaign. That of course wouldn't solve the issue completely but it would decrease the amount of abuse significantly as it's not the same to loose worthless Newbie account and Jr Member. No matter how easy it seems to us to get merits, for an average bounty hunter getting even 1 merit looks like a mountain to climb so they would think twice before joining he campaign with a few alts, considering  how good some members are when it comes to catching the alts.

We all know its all about the quantity and not the quality when it comes to bounty campaigns...

[TheBeardedBaby]

On a side note of issue discussed here, there are thousands of accounts active now of earlier banned users.
You can try if for yourself, check the experiment I made sometime ago which verifies that 50% of those newbies who were active on that time, were fake/banned/alt accounts.
If you want to keep the place tidy, you need to have some kind of control even in those sections you have no interest into.
For instance, someone passing your work as his in the bounty section it's no different then the plagiarism, sure promoting shady/scammy projects is no good at all, but if you don't control the listed projects you cannot expect all the users to make their due diligence which project to support and not. Well, this is a topic for another discussion.
I'm focusing on the issue with those who are here to scam, copying other people's work and trying to pass with it.
Most of the cases are the Bounty Managers to blame, because they don't do their work properly, we had cases where even the managers scammed the participants, like this tokensuite.

We need to keep eye on every section guys. That's it.

[dkbit98]

Bounty managers have different standards and some are obviously willing to 'pay for crap' but not all of them, and we are not helping anyone if we just ignore everything and pretend like we don't care.
I fully support catching and exposing everyone who is cheating and abusing bounties but doing that is not easy work as I learned from my own personal experience.
One thing is for sure and that is we are lacking good posters and demand for advertisement in forum is growing.

[DaveF]

Well, since opinion seems to be against what I was thinking I will not go on a crusade against it.
I know I have said it before, but I'll say it again, I USE the altcoin / token section and would only miss it for about 38 seconds if theymos nuked it.
I'm guessing with the runup of BTC I am just seeing more crap and getting less tolerant.

-Dave

[eddie13]

Starting with there are a lots of people putting in a lot of hard work tracking down the 100s of bounty scammers out there.
lovesmayfamilis, YOSHIE, and all the others are putting in hours of work tracking these people down.

Now...why do we as a group care?
Looking at the "quality" of the work that most of these scammers put out if the bounty managers want to pay for that crap then let them pay.
It's hurting the projects, but the better projects will want better posts / tweets / etc.
The crap is well...crap, let them use crap posters, who give them crap and then they can pay with their crap tokens. Let them all play in their piles of crap.

Or am I just that burn out and tired of dealing the with the 1 list shit posts around here.

-Dave

*Full disclosure if you are reading this some time in the future, I am wearing a paid sig with I post this, but I like to think I'm not posting crap....

I agree a lot..

Sometimes I wonder if these campaign managers, especially the more reputable ones, give these cheater hunters nice BTC tips for “helping” them..
They darn well should IMO..

[nutildah]

Well, since opinion seems to be against what I was thinking I will not go on a crusade against it.
I know I have said it before, but I'll say it again, I USE the altcoin / token section and would only miss it for about 38 seconds if theymos nuked it.

You're right but the forum has created this weird economic ecosystem over there where

- bounty posters advertise projects to each other
- the forum collects revenue selling ads in those sections
- a lot of impoverished people somehow make money.

As a sig campaigner yourself you have to admit there's also a lot of sig campaigners that contribute nothing of value to the forum, and they're not necessarily better just because they receive payment in the form of BTC.

Every once and a while there's some decent posts to be found in Altcoin Discussion but it does require putting on a hazmat suit and wading through sewage to find them.

[The Cryptovator]

What happens of bounty manager faking on a spreadsheet and keep 50% stake for him. Who will investigate that? You are talking about something like your house burning by fire but you don't care since your living room still in the safe zone. Cheating on the bounty is one kind of scam, even a reputed manager wouldn't prevent them alone. When a user successfully scams on bounty then day by day he will attempt a big scam. On the other hand, bounty scammers spamming on all over the forum and it's quite complicated to report them all. Labeling them as scammer and cheater would reduce spam and scams because they wouldn't accept in other campaigns if managers notice participant's trust rating. So, I will say whoever exposing them means they are doing a great job. This forum shouldn't be a safe haven for scammers and spammers.

[DaveF]

- bounty posters advertise projects to each other
- the forum collects revenue selling ads in those sections
- a lot of impoverished people somehow make money.

The 3 points in order:

Advertising projects to each other does not sell the product, it's like I said in my 1st post, just moving crap from one pile to the next.

Without a breakdown from theymos there is no way to know if mods (who are paid) spend more of the forums BTC then having that section generates.

But a lot of time they get worthless tokens.

What happens of bounty manager faking on a spreadsheet and keep 50% stake for him. Who will investigate that?

Bounty managers have been called out before for bad things.
Problem is there are more to take their place.

Using myself as an example, I am at the moment wearing the Roobet sig and it's managed by Hhampuz.
If either one goes "evil" I'm gone. Where you draw the line is up to you.

-Dave

[The Sceptical Chymist]

*Full disclosure if you are reading this some time in the future, I am wearing a paid sig with I post this, but I like to think I'm not posting crap....

You're not a sig campaign shitposter, believe me.  Most members of that odious species relieve their bowels in sections like Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion, not Meta, and there's usually zero thought put into their broken-language posts, which are usually uniform in length.  Just enough to satisfy the character requirement for their campaign.

I got burned out trying to fight shitposters, although I do report instances of garbage posts to the mods when I come across them--I just don't go searching for them anymore.  It's a battle that never ends, and I don't really care about my reporting stats all that much.  I'm not trying to become a moderator here.

But I do admire those members you mentioned who are doing their best at fighting spam (and the other shenanigans that go on here).  They might burn out eventually, but hopefully there will always be members trying to push back against these idiots.

[eddie13]

Should be putting a neutral on the project representatives, ANN posters, and managers..
“Bounties full of alt accounts, poor advertising practices” -warn investors..
“Manager repeatedly hires multiple alt accounts” - warn projects of poor managers..

Make the project and managers feel some pain over it..

For all we know the managers accounts and project rep accounts are all alts too..

[Findingnemo]

First of all Kudoos to the people who invest their time to expose their scammers because I know tracking the address is how much time consuming, tiresome and annoying job because sometimes I tried myself few times and didn't find anything even after 3 hours of continuous tracking.

Asking out of curiosity, do you guys use any special tool for this?
There is nothing wrong with exposing such guys, even they can abandon the exposed one and create a new account to do the same but it is going to take atleast few months or years (thanks to merit system).

[The Cryptovator]

I want to add another benefit to exposing bounty scammers. Just imagine a bounty campaign have thousands spot. An account farmer joins with hundreds of accounts, means there is only nine hundreds unique spot remaining. So that you can say there only nine hundred users getting benefits from a successful campaign where thousands of users are supposed to get benefits. So if we can detect and expose bounty scammers, means there is the possibility that hundreds of users would benefit from the same campaign. We have seen that there many bounty scammers who have been managing more than hundreds of accounts and cheating on the campaign. Although they are claiming that all accounts working on a group, but that would be a false excuse as well.

So, it would be more useful to encourage bounty scam hunters instead of discouraging them. So, other community members would earn a few bags of dust.

[eddie13]

All completely altruistic eh?

My goodness, look at the backscratching/circle jerk of positive trust ratings from one “scam buster”/“cheater catcher” to another, probably merits and inclusions too..
Vigilante cartel lol..

+5 - +10 - +15 and shit without a single trade, DT1, merits up the ass..
2-3 year old accounts straight to the top..

Wonder how many HODL even 1 coin or have any anarchistic principles..

[eddie13]

I’m more interested in other areas of concern, like the forums leadership and idealistic direction, rather than $2 spammers/scammers..

As far as spam I’m much more inclined to lay the blame much higher up the chain, to wherever the money is coming from, rather than the end product of $2 spammers.. I see very little point in going after easily replaceable spammer accounts.. It’s just treating the symptoms while ignoring the underlying cause, while leading to heavy regulation of the individual little guy and uncountable applications of power..

And then that leads to OVERAPPLICATION of power in “this COULD be a scam” situations, which I dislike very much..
Sold accounts are so terrible because they “could” scam?
Shit, +15 DT trusted relatively new accounts on DT1 without a single Satoshi risked “could” scam..

Actually, its really just helping the source of the problem by doing their jobs for them.. let them fork out all sorts of money for worthless offsite spam and laugh at them.. Maybe they will learn to pay for better quality..
Lol at them if they are paying 5 guys/Alts for the same Twitter post that only other Twitter spammers will see.. Their is no value in that and whoever is paying for that/managing should be fired..
I also couldn’t care less how much Twitter and Facebook or whatever get spammed.. It’s funny to me..

Seems not many are willing to get into confrontations with where the money is coming from.. For reasons..

Also, I don’t have much time on my hands these days..

[Quickseller]

I think a lot of this comes down to power and control, TBH. The bounty managers are paying for crap posts/tweets/social media posts, and this is true regardless of if they are alt accounts or not. The merit system ensures the shitposters will never rank up, and most of the bounty sp/sc-ammers stick to the respective bounty threads, so most 'real' users will not even notice.

I would lay the blame on the bounty managers who are paying for the crap various types of posts. The projects that are hiring the bounty managers are also not paying enough to attract quality advertisers. I doubt most of the projects care about alt accounts -- IMO the purpose of the social media campaigns is to generate fake interest in their projects. There are rules against paying people to post in specific threads on the forum, but no such rules apply on other social media sites.