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,pjaFTvpNow, 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.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/Lyc05nC.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/skZOibp.png