Topic: Does stealing efforts = scam ? need opinion (Read 798 times)

If, not paying the bounty hunters their worthless shit tokens deserves a tag, then we need to tag 1/5 ICO accounts daily. Most of them delay their token payments and some might ask for a deposit to pay their tokens. Bounties are too risky, and at the same time consumes much of the bounty hunter's work too (ignoring the signature spam, twitter and facebook adverts). I am just ignoring the way how bad these hunters destroy this forum, but some of the translators and article writers does a honest job and they get scammed easily. As most of us know, it's not just easier to translate the whole whitepaper in their native language, but most of them are not getting paid.

ICO companies fear a lot while releasing their tokens. That's the primary reason for their delay since for a longer time, these bounty hunters were considered to be the bears which might destroy the whole market for their token. Last month when I was going through one old thread in the Serious Discussion board, a hunter was blaming the ICO company which demanded ETH from the hunters for relesing the bounty tokens.

Negative Feedback for companies like these is the only way to prevent people from getting scammed, but most of the bounty hunters live a low life and would never likely learn from their mistakes.

IMO this belongs in scam accusations at this point, there is sufficient evidence of malpractice.

Hopefully we will see part 3 in the future, they have spent only 600,000 tokens out of originally planned 3,000,000 ones.

+1
Would be nice, thank you.

@1miau can't say i am surprised at all , after i knew about them having two different bounty campaigns , i was only waiting for how the second would play out. Now it is pretty clear they are going to dump all the "un-paid" tokens along side with the rest that they own, price will sink and they will blame the "market".

I am going to translate Menascam part 2 to Arabic if you don't mind.

They are a very good example how a project can ruin their reputation in a few weeks...

Maybe I should also do an ICO and "green mining" with premined shitcoins. 



Menapay team strategy well explained. 
Why so selfish??

Do you know the number of unsold tokens? I guess that's another bad surprise...

There are also inconsistencies outside the Bounty Campaign.

According to the OnePager, the unsold tokens should get burned.



http://archive.is/YmqW2

And suddenly these unsold tokens are provided for the companies "green mining program ". Whatever this crap is. 


https://t.me/MenaPay/54994


https://t.me/MenaPay/55663

So the Team "felt it would be better" to keep the unsold tokens.
Yeah sure, sounds logical. 

In the end, they change their minds just as it benefits them.

By the way, I'm one of those idiots who wasted two months of his time on their signature campaign.

MenaScam, part II

Today, the team has released the final bounty spreadsheet from their bitcointalk bounty and they are truly talented when it comes to changing the rules afterwards to deceive people: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rWGEHnwahq7REx0kLCJ2sY54cuneaTa2onAirTrwrv0/edit#gid=1999922025

In total, they promised to allocate 500,000$ in Menapay tokens for the bounty (archive) but only distributed around 109,500$ (662.000 Menapay x 0,165$/Menapay) because they lowered the allocation for some parts of the bounty:

- Translation allocation was reduced
- A part of the Telegram campaign was reduced
- The signature campaign was reduced that every participant got not more than a maximum than 2,000 Menapay. (the duration of the campaign was more than a half year (28 weeks) and some members got over 10,000 Menapay according the initial rules but were now reduced to 2,000. That's easily to prove by comparing the signature spreadsheet vs the total distribution spreadsheet

They wrote in the Telegram that the remaining funds will be used for future bounties / airdrops and act totally innocent. 
My conclusion: red trust is well deserved.

I would say a negative rating is warranted in this case. This is what is called theft of services. If a guy comes to your house and patches your roof and you tell him to fuck off he cant just take your roof with him, so he will call the police and have you charged with theft of services. This is functionally the same concept. Additionally once they confirmed you as being in the program with a set terms of service/exchange they created a binding contract. Unless they explicitly have an exemption allowing the terms to be changed at any time they are liable for payment.

If we look at how obligations and contracts works then they absolutely have violated their own terms by changing the requirements as soon as the bounty ended. The point is the bounty hunters have obviously done their part and expected for a payment in exchange for their efforts they aren't aware of this additional requirements while the campaign is ongoing and the bounty manager pretty soon afterwards have made this requirement. Surely this is some kind of trap for bounty hunters are forced to do in order to get the payments they should have received with no questions ask.

Definitely! A company that doesn't pay its employees and campaigns that do not pay their participants are scammers. You can't change rules as you wish but sad thing is here they are not legally bound by any agreement while if you are not paid by a company, you have a legal right. Another case like Tokenpay.

@The Pharmacist

It is not about who is the victim, it is about the criminal , even if a scammer scammed another scammer, are you going to give him a pass because the victim is not worthy of symphaty ? I don't think you will.

Let alone the fact there is no way those 3000+ hunters were spammers, there must have been 10 or 20 semi-good posters.


 

Since most of these ICOs are run by scammers looking to steal money from investors, it should come as no surprise to anyone that they pull shit like this with their bounty participants.  These are not inherently honest people we're dealing with, so nobody should expect them to stand by their word when they hire bounty hunters to advertise for them.

I don't care how much effort they put in.  I have very little sympathy for people who are essentially spammers, which is what bounty hunters are.  If they weren't promoting ICOs with all of their multiple alt accounts, they'd be sending phishing and Nigerian prince-type scam e-mails or other related nonsense. 

And no matter how many times they get scammed by these ICOs, they still keep coming back for more--they're stupid and they're obviously unable to learn from their mistakes.  I have a problem when a legitimate bitcoin-paying signature campaign manager doesn't pay his participants (like Lightlord/Lutpin a few months ago), but I'm not going to shed any tears over some bounty hunters when they get screwed.  They're a cancer on this forum.

It's a scam and I've tagged it as such.

Yes, looks like Menapay isn't very interested in a healthy communication. 

Maybe it's a little bit confusing how Menapay managed their ICO marketing, they had 2 different bounties:

- one of them was managed by bounty0x, a special bounty website for managing various bounties (third party, not related to Menapay) (here (tasks not visible because bounty is ended))
- the other one was managed on Bitcointalk in-house by Menapay (here)

And Menapay is responsible to sent the funds for both bounties. bounty0x has checked the work for the bounty0x part and of that checked part Menapay wants only to pay 3% of the bounty hunters (111 from 3000 participants).
The result of the bounty on Bitcointalk is not known yet.
For both campaigns the extra-work was added.


It's getting ridiculous how projects are trying to cheat the most helpless people to save costs...

The word "blackmailing" is what i missed in the OP, this is exactly what this whole thing is about , if you read the chat between the bounty manager and the ICO team, the ICO team's excuse was that they wanted to verify the existence of the bounty hunters, assuming that many of them could have been bots or what he refers to as "dead people".

the funny thing is, downloading an app is an easy task for a bot, if they wanted to confirm the existence of the hunters there could have been better ways of doing this, but your theory makes sense, they want those "fake/forced/bought" 5 stars rating on their worthless piece of shit app.

That's too much red flag for me, though they have the authority to change everything on rules of the bounty but I guess it is still unethical if there will be another work to be added for all bounty participants and yet a penny will just be given for them. It's better to tag them and hoping those bounty participants will do so too to stop it not just being a martyr over shitty ICOs like that.

Menapay's ICO was also discussed in our German local board because the project was presented on a famous altcoin blog and therefore the number of participants in the bounty was relatively high. After reading it, my intention was originally also to give them a negative tag but I decided to wait how the whole issue would continue after their release of the final spreadsheet. (they don't have released it yet, even after 8 weeks (!!!!) of "checking" it.) Token distribution is planned for May 16.
That's why I left no red tag yet although there is far more than enough shady shit to tag them already.


Correct, in addition to add more work by Menapay after everything was ended I see this as blackmailing the users to leave a five-star-rating (the best one) for the app, otherwise they don't get their bounty tokens. That's similar to buy reputation for Menapay and has nothing to do with ratings left for a legitimate reason because the users are forced to do it and if they won't do it, they don't receive rewards for their work.

I'm almost sure that was planned, it would be no problem to include the rules in the bounty rules from the beginning and before the users join they see the rules. Otherwise, rules make no sense if I add some of them after the campaign.  
Another thing is that the App didn't really work for many when they had to download it, there were so many complaints about it how buggy the App was. But that only as a side-note.  


If they really care for honest participants they would have added better rules before or hired a professional manager and not managing it "in-house" for the Bitcointalk part. It's clear to me that they were only interested to get as much as possible free (spam) advertising from everyone and remove as much as possible users later.


I will also tag them and remove my tag only if they distribute the tokens like stated in the original rules. Thanks for bringing up the issue here.  

Usually, tagging bounty or ICO related accounts is not worth it at all. The bounty hunters are spammers and account farmers themselves, they don't really care about investigating the bounty team or whatever before joining them. The bounty manager hired by the team is fuck-all and not experienced. Everyone is equally involved. In the above case, if the bounty manager had mentioned that he can change the rules during the bounty and the participants agreed to it, then it makes sense otherwise it doesn't.

What I find really irritating when I read the conversation is how he is trying to find exuses for what they did. Pascal an d Deniz tryed to explain to him that what he is doing is wrong but in vain.
Obviously, they had the intention to scam bounty hunters from the beginning:


Also, I didn't like his arrogance and talking about bounty hunters as they were slaves.

There is a lot to say about how bounty hunters are negatively affecting the forum, but this does not give you the right to exploit them.
They, absolutely, deserve the red tag.

You are completely right on your decission IMO. Changing rules after ending bounty campaign is nothing but a scam. Its a complete commitment breakup and participants will not get their exact return for their bounty work.

I am not agree with them who believe that joining bounties are useless now. There was a time participating on bounty was so much popular but day by day these scammers make the situation worse. As a result Community users dare to join this kinda bounties.