How to hunt down Slack scammers.

Scams and phishing attempts are a huge pain in the crypto space. At Bounty0x, we took a somewhat special approach to get rid of them.

First things first — Why is it so hard to fight scammers?

Scammers in the cryptocurrency space have become extremely astute in their endeavors. Before starting a DM phishing attack, they carefully research who the admins of the Slack channel are. This way, they know what slack usernames NOT to send a phishing message to since they would get banned instantly.

Some numbers.

In 2017, Ethereum bandits have stolen over $225mln through their elaborate phishing scams. Yes, you read that correctly: nearly one quarter billion USD.

Anti scam bots.

We first tried solutions like the Anti-scam bot by Philippe Castonguay. The bot is awesome and definitely helped us to regain a bit of control over the scamming situation. However, it did not eradicate it entirely.

What we did (¬‿¬).

At Bounty0x we decided to take a somewhat unique approach to preventing these scams. As some of you may now, we are building a bounty hunting network, so we decided to leverage that.

We recruited 15 trustworthy Bounty Hunters on our Alpha platform for hunting down Slack scammers. No one else can participate. This aspect is extremely important because if the bounty was public, we would incentivize people to post scams and report themselves to earn the reward.

In order to avoid the point outlined in the second paragraph of this post, we kept the identity of all bounty hunters anonymous. Whenever one of these 15 bounty hunters finds a scammer, they just need to submit the username of the criminal on our Alpha. We then ban the user immediately and pay the reward.

The results.

Not a single Ether has been stolen from our community yet.

No more phishing attempts since we posted the “Scammer Hunting Bounty”.

Checkmate, scammers.

Learn More

For more information about bounty0x:

Check out our white paper

Join us on Telegram

Subscribe for email updates

Follow us on Twitter

Subscribe to our subreddit