The world of Bounty Scam: Qurrex, TokenPay and more

Crypto world is so strange.
One day it’s raining, one day it’s sunny. And this is not only the case of market volatility. Because if you are a bounty hunter, the situation is worse.
Indeed, bounty managers keep changing the rules of the first announcement, penalizing those who work for them.

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These are the more frequents scenarios:

Postponing bounty end
Justifying with bearish market, bounty managers move the deadline and oblige each bounty hunter to complete the campaign avoiding stake losses. Yes, because for some managers delaying the end of the bounty is not enough, they will also disqualify you if you decide to change the campaign (this is the case of the signature campaigns, which usually are the best ones), so you only have two choices: throwing away weeks and weeks of work of being obligated to keep the same signature for several additional weeks, because we’re not talking about 2-3 extra weeks, we’re talking about months!
Postponing the bounty end increases the number of participants and consequently reduces the value of all stakes gained by each bounty hunter. This situation is not rewarded increasing the total amount allocated to bounty campaign, the budget is always the same but you are required to work 2-3 times more. You are working for 10 $ and suddenly you are paid 5 $ at work completed.
This is the case of Ubiatar or MediChain.

Reducing bounty amount
Sometimes bounty managers introduce a rule that is not a rule: “the bounty rules can be changed in anytime by the bounty manager”. This is the case of the jungle, as happened for Daostack, where bounty manager reduced the tokens amount because the ICO ended with 2 weeks of advance. So, in these cases, the capacity of the bounty hunter to work for projects that are interested and attractive for investors, fell. Furthermore, this introduces a variable: where do the bounty tokens go? What is their final use? Because this is not specified in the whitepaper and it can damage the investors’ interests.

Splitting the bounty campaign
You wake up and discover that the bounty campaign is ending but bounty manager has reduced the bounty reward because he will start another one in a second moment. This is the case of Qurrex, project that follows trustless and transparency in its product but is not able to apply this principles to bounty hunters. This case is hard to accept, because until the day before you are calculating a reward and unexpected it is reduced to a half.

Changing the rules ongoing
The wonderful case of GBX bounty campaign, where the bounty managers deleted the obligation of KYC validation before starting bounty campaign and allowed all bounty hunters to adequate to it once campaign ended. Furthermore, tokens addressed to bounty hunters that, notwithstanding the grace period, avoided to pass through KYC because they used multiple accounts (i.e.) were not divided for all bounty hunters respecting the rules but held by bounty managers to finance another bounty campaign; all unrespecting initial general rules.
And we can find again Ubiatar also in this category, a few days before the end of the campaign, after they already extended it for several weeks, they decided it wasn’t enough, so they also decided to reduce the reward and finance a new bounty campaign with part of the money which was supposed to be the reward of the bounty hunters of the first campaign. Congratulations Ubiatar, being in two categories of projects that exploit bounty hunters is a great achievement!

Stake calculation not respecting announcement rules
This practice is used by inexpert managers or presumptuous ones, that are not able to admit on their mistakes and don’t accept critics or suggestions. This is the case of Qurrex team (again, sigh!), whose admins state to divide bounty total amount into different activities in the official bounty announcement and at the moment of calculation sum all stakes calculated and divide the amount for all stakes. This cause great damages to the ICO project because it evidences the organization incapacity and cut bounty hunters’ confidence. Indeed, this practice disqualify valuable works and remunerate higher simple and mechanical activities.

ICO completed and bounties not payed
This is the worst case, this is the case of TokenPay, whose ICO admins, after a successful completed own ICO, decided to not pay any reward, making up a story that the bounty manager inserted friends addresses and stole all the revenues. It’s hard to accept, because there is no law to apply! So, the bounty hunters are hardly penalized and start to FUD the project, devastating the value of tokens, acquired by unaware investors.

This is a jungle and if you are a bounty hunter you can understand this article, written with the purpose to sensitize all bounty hunters to push admins to respect rules and ICO team to claim bounty hunters act fairy with bounty hunters that, sometimes, are the first investors as well. Show some respect for our work please.

The reflection point is: why do not apply smart contracts to bounty activities?