I've been in the bounties in this past few weeks in order to do something in order to have some earnings in my free time, probably to join a signature campaign since it's doesn't required a full time to do it and you hold your own time to complete the tasks needed by the campaign.
After hovering for a couple of page there's one campaign that gets my attention because of its presentation and the concept and solutions of their project to the existing problem (Whitepaper) so to make it short it's a legitimate project, after reading the thread there's a note stated that "Campaign requires KYC." well i'm not from the US but this concerns me, for what I've known a KYC stands for "Know your CUSTOMER" so basically it's for the investors or the customer of the certain project.
According to Wikipedia a "Know your customer is the process of a business verifying the identity of its clients and assessing potential risks of illegal intentions for the business relationship. The term is also used to refer to the bank regulations and anti-money laundering regulations which govern these activities."
In my understanding a KYC is a document needed in order to know the credibility of a certain person (investor) if the money they going to invest came from illegal works, money laundering and also to know the status of a person if he/she is has a criminal records for the certain country, etc. but in this case it's required in order to get the rewards.
As a bounty hunter and a fellow forum user this concerns me. Giving personal details to anyone on the internet is VERY DANGEROUS in today's era we can't live without using technologies including online banking, etc. it means they can use your personal datas in order to do illegal works and the likes, but let me give you the advantages and disadvantages of it (According to my own perspective) why they're requiring users to pass KYC documents in doing bounty works.
Reasons:
- To control spam
- To avoid users who uses multiple accounts
- To avoid cheaters
- To avoid abusers
- To get personal infos and used to illegal works (It might be right?)
Effects: (For bounty hunters)
- Risk
Summary:
There are different possible reasons why the project requires the users to submit KYC documents. Probably a good reason or a bad reason but no matter what sending a personal documents or a personal valid ID is very risk for the users.
Solutions:
There are some ways in order to avoid risk in sending personal details/KYC to bounty campaigns
- Review the project
- Read every technical details
- Review each team member
- If the projects seems unprofessional it's a scam
but the safest way is not to send any information of yourself on the internet.
Disclaimer: All of the statement, solutions, etc. above are according to my observations, opinions and perspective on the said topic it might be right to others or wrong to others. This section might be wrong (I don't know where to post, maybe in meta? please correct me.) but I posted here because most of the bounty hunters are wandering in this section.
For the exchangers it can be consider or reasonable to apply KYC, but in some other bounties they have this kind of rules, though in some your reason was right, but it is not necessary actually, because some bounty campaign don't have this kind of rules. And yet, in the end they distributed the bounty rewards to all their participants which has no difference in the bounty who have KYC. But sometimes, if you are one of the participants you need to follow even you don't like to do that.