Only one user and already trouble! Should I pay the extortion?

[Gebbit]

I wrote some of this two days ago and tried to update it now in response to developments.

Bitcoin business is hard work. Our site gebbit.com has only had one user so far but we've already had one attempted scammer and two attempts to hack us even though btc payments are sent to an offline wallet. I'm making this post because we're in a sticky situation and could use your opinion. There is a marketer who lied about his work and is guilty of time theft. The question is should I pay up? Gebbit paid him handsomely but caught him red handed lying about work he claimed to have done but did not do. I have been trying to get him to provide documentation so that I could find out his real name to warn other people and while he has sent me many photos the definition is purposefully low quality to the point of illegibility. I think he knew he had been caught.

I have seen polls on this site but I am not sure how to create one, if someone in the comments could let me know I would be grateful


I feel like I shouldn't pay him for work he did not do but there is a conflict of interest so I thought I would ask the community. It might also be smart just to pay him so that he will not lie about our company. For instance he is now spreading a lie saying we were hacked when we were never hacked.

Here is the story. About maybe a month ago we placed up a post seeking a marketer. A few people responded and we decided to pay 3 people weekly. The problem with such arrangements is lack of oversight. Gebbit discontinued business with one of the users who did things such as making shill accounts and simply acting as a bad representative. Another was discontinued simply for failing to put in hours and then completely messing up the first couple tasks. The marketer we kept on for the longest period was a guy that I will herein refer to as S.

S seemed to work hard and follow direction the first week. However, pretty quickly the amount of output for hours seemed to dwindle. Repeatedly S was told to link to his work when appropriate or show correspondences and his progress in terms of the development of promotional material and time and time again he failed to do so. S also placed his own marketing strategy ahead of the priorities which were given to him. Over two or so weeks it was repeatedly made clear to S that the most important thing was to work on a specific set of promotional materials. A task that might take 1 or 2 hours of work maximum. An email was later sent detailing S's failure to follow direction. The email stated how he needed to be told X 3 times, Y 3 times, Z 2 times and so on. Hours and hours were reportedly spent on managing a twitter account while his primary directive was ignored.

One of the promotional tasks was for him to screenshot some images and put little red boxes around them to show the steps required to use Gebbit. This required 8 screenshots, each with a red box and an arrow directing the user. After being told multiple times over the course of a long period he finally responded last Thursday stating that he was working on the pictures. He sent 3 emails.



"Worked an hour handling Twitter and preparing,
and for images on the guide."


"Worked 2 hours maintaining Twitter account and worked on the images a bit more.
Just about 4 moer images and I can hand them to you."


 "Took a break on making the guide pictures as of now, eyes hurt. I've been handling the Twitter though,
and getting more translations as sent."



Two days ago, after still no progress and him putting in more hours managing a twitter account created to promote Gebbit, we tell him we are scaling down our involvement with him. At this point I have for a while been sceptical that he is actually doing any of the work he says he is doing because he has not produced any work and spends hours a day on twitter doing what seems to be nothing. He had already agreed to hand over accounts and be paid after the transfer process so we asked him to hand over the accounts and the promotional material. He handed over almost all accounts but not the images which he has allegedly put a lot of work on.

He emails us asking for pay. We email back stating that we are waiting for the images. He emails us back the following image.

http://imgur.com/2bPr5DQ,aKATuyt,YJJIsHd,zVm2Err,Q9L6961,x8mRJyo,kVLTiUu,pjaFTvp

Now, mind you, just coincidentally our homepage was slightly changed hours before this last email. I can see that this screenshot was made within the previous 2 hours. Meaning that he lied in his previous emails suggesting that he was working on the images and saying once that he had 4 of them done. Also what happened to him only having 4 more pictures left last Thursday? Because a hacker attempted to hack the site registration was temporarily down. The hack was unsuccessful of course but it made us exceed our email capacity. In order to register for an account you need to confirm your email address and 4500 emails had already been sent out in the previous 2 days because of the hacker. My guess is that he did not even have a Gebbit account which is why he couldn't quickly do the other pictures because he could not get past the log-in screen.

Gebbit is a young company and collectively the team has invested a lot of time and money. We are building Gebbit on the hope that users will come. We are one of the only sites where bitcoin deposits go to an offline wallet. Where we can completely limit our live wallet liability to an insured amount. We are probably one of the only sites to have physical protocols in dealing with sensitive information, user information, cold wallet storage, and so on. We have made a deal to ensure liquidity and Gebbit is maintaining a 4 cent spread. But none of that matters if we do not develop a trusted brand.

Marketing is not our strong suit. The site has been open for a month and only one user has actually sent payment. Since he was the first user to send payment he qualified for our prize and actually won a 100EUR reward. We have already had hack attempts as stated and now it seems someone we trusted turned out to be a scammer who is now laughably threatening us and talking smack. S and the other two marketers contributions have done literally nothing to promote the site. So, we are welcome to hearing any marketing ideas if you have them.

As for S, I almost feel like paying him off for work he obviously has not done just so he will stop calling us scammers. But doing that just feels wrong. I also think it sets a bad precedent and that we will be shaken down later. I would rather gebbit be the site that has a fair reputation but no tolerance towards this.

I'm still not against paying him though if I hear good reasons or the community thinks it is the right thing to do.

Here are some of the pictures he sent us. They are cropped just in case you can some how read the documentation but I put in some of the documentation so you could see how out of focus it is. I tried finding out his real name and am putting up a .05btc bounty for someone who can PM me proof of his real name.

https://i.imgur.com/eAe9p3z.png
https://i.imgur.com/Lyc05nC.png
https://i.imgur.com/skZOibp.png

[1714978211]

1714978211

[1714978211]

1714978211

[dropt]

Pay him only for the work done, or don't pay him at all if he's breached contract.  Especially if he's trying to extort you.  TBH I've never heard of Gebbit so I wouldn't even care if some nobody claimed you were hacked.  It's not like you have some massive business tied to the name, so you could easily rebrand if you felt his extortion attempts actually impacted your business.  Where did you find this guy anyways?

[Gebbit]

Pay him only for the work done, or don't pay him at all if he's breached contract.  Especially if he's trying to extort you.  TBH I've never heard of Gebbit so I wouldn't even care if some nobody claimed you were hacked.  It's not like you have some massive business tied to the name, so you could easily rebrand if you felt his extortion attempts actually impacted your business.  Where did you find this guy anyways?

Well, if I had to guess the 20 hours he's asking to be paid for he maybe worked a total of 3 hours and the week prior to that which he was paid for I suspected he worked much fewer hours than reported. He also already has 40$ worth of btc that was set aside for a marketing project. I was going to just pay him and let him off but after he emailed us proof of my suspicions, well they were no longer just suspicions.

How did I find him? I think he saw a post on reddit and emailed us from that.

[FundsMoney]

I am in no position to judge anyone, but as an observer and a Gebbit user I take sides with Gebbit on this one. Because of that, I've given Gebbit my reputation point based on my experience and personal belief.

Also, I've taken into account the fact that "small" did not present any proof, but Gebbit did and it was unfavorable for S. and against his story.

[Gebbit]

Thank you FundsMoney.

I dug up an email I wrote him which stated the following. I'm not sure if he doesn't understand how websites work and actually believed Gebbit was hacked or if he is intentionally spreading misinformation.

"We're sorry for the inconvenience. In case you are interested yesterday we had our first hack attempt and today it has occurred again. We have been putting up CATCHAs on the regristration forms but as of right now our emailer has reached its daily limit. Tomorrow morning things should be working normally."

We knew we would have to put up CATCHAs sometime but we didn't expect it so soon. If we wait until the site is perfect to release it we would have to wait a very long time. However there is definitely no security issue. We have plans to develop it more of course and increasing the payment options is one of our main concerns now. Last week we were able to make sure there was much more available liquidity on the site and that the spread would be reasonable. Because of our liquidity agreement for the past week there has been a 4 to 6 cent spread with the highest bid and the lowest ask being quite large orders.

[Gebbit]

poll has been added. Results are shown after voting. I think that will cause more people to vote.

[Gebbit]

Poll has been changed to be visible before voting.

[Small]

Now, mind you, just coincidentally our homepage was slightly changed hours before this last email. I can see that this screenshot was made within the previous 2 hours. Meaning that he lied in his previous emails suggesting that he was working on the images and saying once that he had 4 of them done. Also what happened to him only having 4 more pictures left last Thursday? Because a hacker attempted to hack the site registration was temporarily down. The hack was unsuccessful of course but it made us exceed our email capacity. In order to register for an account you need to confirm your email address and 4500 emails had already been sent out in the previous 2 days because of the hacker. My guess is that he did not even have a Gebbit account which is why he couldn't quickly do the other pictures because he could not get past the log-in screen.

smallstratos@hotmail.com
I HAVE had an account there for as long as Ive been your marketer.

Also forgetting to include THESE pictures which show the name
http://prntscr.com/6g7bg3 - proof it was sent to him
http://imgur.com/SNTeuwx - the pic where you can see the name

Asshole doesn't know what webcam is.
I'm not some rich person that uses a DSLR camera to take a picture of a doc.

I feel like I shouldn't pay him for work he did not do but there is a conflict of interest so I thought I would ask the community. It might also be smart just to pay him so that he will not lie about our company. For instance he is now spreading a lie saying we were hacked when we were never hacked.

I said that you were hacked, but you didn't tell the public until now.
For an "insured" exchange, you should've mentioned that to the public,
but of course. you didn't. the same way you can't tell the public who you are.

[Small]

and for the record:

Don't give me that:
HIGH DEFINITION
CAN'T READ PLEASE SEND ANOTHER BULLSHIT.

[irfan_pak10]

I think you should really pay him for what he did for you. He made few thread here on this forum and advertise your site. Its not his problem that your site did not get any customer if you did not any according to you but according to small you got few customers.
You should pay him atleast what he did in this forum as pay per post whilst he was also wearing your sig.

And also he sent me in pm

I'm sorry Ifran.
As you replied to the topic, you need an explanation.

I've never been so upset in my life.
I honestly did my work as best as I can, and even though I did I've still been abused.

I handled a Twitter account, Reddit account, several forum accounts, gained legit followers, paid some people from my own pocket
for campaigns like the Twitter Campaign I handled...

I worked on the guide like I was instructed, paid for press releases, and genuinely cared for the customers of Gebbit, but I was
condemned for doing so.

I don't understand why.

And I'm absolutely sure there wasn't only 1 sign up.
http://prntscr.com/6g832w

[Gebbit]

There was only 1 person who actually sent payment aside from the liquidity provider. However, that is at all not the accusation. The truth is Small was caught lying about his work. He had been paid already for the previous 2 or 3 weeks prior. At first he did do good work but it became evident that he was not following instructions and was only doing the type of work which was unverifiable. I had my suspicions but no proof. However, when I caught him lying red handed I can only believe that instead of him being such a terrible worker that he indeed didn't do other things that he said he did. If I had to guess his time theft in total significantly exceeds the hours he's requesting to be paid for now as the time theft started before the previous week.

I know someone justified not paying because he didn't actually cause the site to gain any traction but that is not at all something gebbit would do. We had an agreement and we will keep that agreement. Since we know that he lied about having fulfilled his end of the agreement and that we cannot take his word any more we are in a sticky situation but only because we are not impartial in the matter. However, I can't imagine an impartial party thinking we should pay for services not rendered. We have no idea however exactly how much time theft Small is responsible but if I had to guess it would exceed the amount we owe him. 

[Gebbit]

Also you can see that Small is still spreading misinformation claiming that Gebbit was hacked when it was never hacked.

Small, the only legible name is your signature and this is the picture you only sent me today well after this thread was made. Also, I am sure with your previous payments having made a lot more per hour than the average person in your country you can afford to go to a prints hop as we've suggested to you for days now.

[EvilPanda]

How much were you paying him? I saw him advertise Gebbit and the reward you were giving, but it's very likely he had to spend only an hour a day on this.
Now to the details.
You agreed that you'll pay him to perform specific tasks, among which was the screenshot guide and it seems he failed to do it. You also asked him to spread the word, which he did.
Sum up all the tasks he was given and count them. What percentage was he able to accomplish? Maybe this will help you to decide how much you should pay him.

[RCHumphrey]

Its always difficult to trace work online. Withholding payment for work done in a normal job is normally only under extreme circumstances for which you need to provide more information on what was expected and what was actually done. You only paid for 15-20 hours, that is what 2-3 days of full time work. It would have been clear he had not been performing what was expected after hours surely?

[Small]

I FINISHED the guide he's been telling me to do.
the other images look different because as I said in our emails,
i did them in different times. Which is why I worked on 4 images at a time.

Another, getting traffic without spamming (like what you're doing right now)
is a lot of work, and cannot be done in just a few hours.

Posting tweets is unverifiable?
Check the timeline.

[moni3z]

This thread shouldn't exist.

You pay the guy or you don't, never ever bring inside drama about your business to reddit/here/anywhere it's like the last thing I would ever think of doing.

As for your site UI, the first thing I notice is I have to sign up an account just to look at it.  Say what you want about btc-e.com but landing on their front page immediately I can tell what's for trade, see order book, watch trades, (unfortunately watch trollbox too) and no account is needed. To me that is better marketing than being forced to hand over email addresses  immediately.

Second, the security information is nebulous.
"Gebbit uses AES-256" means nothing to me. What mode? Because if it's CBC/XTS that's bad http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/04/30/you-dont-want-xts/
"Insured wallet" by who? no information
"Security protocols" such as?


Withdraw information is nebulous. How long exactly do withdraws of BTC take. If you're claiming everything is offline then somebody has to physically sign the txn so I'm guessing you have hours of operation (not posted).

One email address "support@whatever.com" isn't going to work if say, tomorrow you had 1,000 customers and all their deposits had problems.
There is no information where your corp is, who is running it, phone numbers if my money disappears into a black hole, no bank info, no registration numbers with any known gov ect ect. This can all be excused if there is a multi-sig escrow insurance paid to somebody trusted here, who can hold one signature to ensure users won't have their money stolen should you be hacked out of existence, get shut down, run off with the money ect. So HeroMemberBob and HeroMemberAlice will both hold a sig, and you will hold the other sig to $100,000 in capital put up for insurance. Now we can all trade $100,000 max ceiling and have no worries about your identity (be as anon as you want, who cares). If not, then you have to prove to us why we should trust you with BTC/fiat since we've seen so many exchanges die from incompetence or fraud what makes you different than the idiots who once shut down their ec2 instance and wiped their entire wallet.dat (yes, this actually happened see bitomat.pl).

Also, if you are manually doing txns then add some altcoins, why not. Add all the one's that do multi-sig (I haven't kept up with altcoins, I assume some have multisig).
Even if bitcoins are kept offline, it's still possible to inject site credits and buy coins and withdraw with them. I assume there is some sort of manual accounting/balance sheet going on to prevent this if everything is manual. It is in your competitors interest to sabotage your site and if they can alter the front page, jack the db and start leaking email/passwords, or cause any kind of black PR and uncertainty re: your site security then it's game over so even if somebody "just alters the front page" that's important.

You should also expect attempted breaches by everybody on earth, there is money involved and they will try. http://homakov.blogspot.ca/2015/01/bitstamp-problem-and-warm-wallets.html

[Small]

-snip-

Honestly for me, he went over the line since he leaked the images here in the first place.
I was expecting the business to follow a privacy policy like a professional company and keep it to themselves.

Another red flag for them imo.

[Gebbit]

Its always difficult to trace work online. Withholding payment for work done in a normal job is normally only under extreme circumstances for which you need to provide more information on what was expected and what was actually done. You only paid for 15-20 hours, that is what 2-3 days of full time work. It would have been clear he had not been performing what was expected after hours surely?

20 hours a week was the amount of work expected of him. So far he should have put in I think 80 hours of work for Gebbit if we had him on for 4 weeks. I think he worked for less than 60 hours. If it wasn't for catching him red handed I would have no proof that he is a time thief. Now with the proof if I had to estimate he has worked less than the amount of hours he has been paid for.

Small you are not entitled to the same privacy that users of the sites are. You were allegedly providing us a service.

[Gebbit]

I FINISHED the guide he's been telling me to do.
the other images look different because as I said in our emails,
i did them in different times. Which is why I worked on 4 images at a time.

Another, getting traffic without spamming (like what you're doing right now)
is a lot of work, and cannot be done in just a few hours.

Posting tweets is unverifiable?
Check the timeline.

You failed to send the pictures of the guide so if you finished the guide but failed to send the pictures I don't understand how you can ask for pay.

I dug up part of an email sent on the 4th

"
Imagine the time I have lost in the past week due to your mismanagement. This is
the

3rd time I am sending you this guide as you had lost it already once before
3rd time I am asking you to create a picture for each point with red boxes as
shown in the wikihow link (you have not replied to either of the previous 2
emails confirming you can or have done this)
2nd time I am sending you the amended sentence (I had sent you the first email
on Monday after the 2nd email regarding your pay
I sent one email ahead of time stating that the extra pay would go to
your hours from the previous week
and then had spend 20 minutes writing an email reminding you why you
were only paid 150$ (because you had already been paid for many of your hours)
This is the more than 3rd time I have brought up the importance of this guide. "

[Small]

I FINISHED the guide he's been telling me to do.
the other images look different because as I said in our emails,
i did them in different times. Which is why I worked on 4 images at a time.

Another, getting traffic without spamming (like what you're doing right now)
is a lot of work, and cannot be done in just a few hours.

Posting tweets is unverifiable?
Check the timeline.

You failed to send the pictures of the guide so if you finished the guide but failed to send the pictures I don't understand how you can ask for pay.

I dug up part of an email sent on the 4th

"
Imagine the time I have lost in the past week due to your mismanagement. This is
the

3rd time I am sending you this guide as you had lost it already once before
3rd time I am asking you to create a picture for each point with red boxes as
shown in the wikihow link (you have not replied to either of the previous 2
emails confirming you can or have done this)
2nd time I am sending you the amended sentence (I had sent you the first email
on Monday after the 2nd email regarding your pay
I sent one email ahead of time stating that the extra pay would go to
your hours from the previous week
and then had spend 20 minutes writing an email reminding you why you
were only paid 150$ (because you had already been paid for many of your hours)
This is the more than 3rd time I have brought up the importance of this guide. "

In the end did i or did I not send the pictures?

You expect a perfect marketer who doesn't have a shit ton of clients in emails
and gets cluttered sometimes? You couldn't even manage your business.