Topic: Vidy (Vidycoin) Scammed Bounty Hunters for $100k + gross negligence (Read 607 times)

Getting it up - Vidy is still quite active so this topic needs to be refreshed as a warning to the community.

that was expected. they've lost a huge amount of crowd support in the form of bounty participants. if they did not scammed bounty participants and have paid that $100k tokens to bounty participants .they could've easily converted these thousands of bounty participants into a lot of votes and win the competition.
they should still understand this fact and accept it. and fix the bounty program issue. otherwise they have to be ready to face more issues in the future.

they loss that competition with huge margin at-least new investors saved from this team

Reserved for bounty hunter comments. Coming 07/10/2019.

they are participating in Biannce Listing Competition. could someone try to contact binance support and inform them about their scam attempt? they should be blacklisted from Binance competition.

Unfortunately, they're clearly avoiding the situation and any kind of questions related to the bounty.

We'll let the situation roll out for a little longer, allow bounty hunters and other community members to check this topic out and eventually start hitting a few PR websites.

It looks like they are doing everything in their power to not address this issue as well. I went to their group chat on TG @vidycoin - and asked about this issue.

I was expecting a logical explanation of some sort or at least an excuse for misunderstanding or miscommunication.

Instead, I was kicked and banned from the group.

Kudos to you @Parodium for bringing this development to our attention unlike some other managers which would had immediately taken side with the project decisions. It surprises me though that affected members didn't create an accusation thread earlier or where they taking directions and relying on your detail accusation as seen in OP.

Have left the project a negative feedback to alert potential patronizers of their scam like behavior, hope this get resolved soon but if you feel it won't then I won't mind supporting a created flag to make the accusation more visible since the project is still very active.

Sorry to hear that! I know we don't deserve it and they ought to resolve that issue months ago and come into a compromised agreement with qualified bounty participants but didn't do anything to fix it!

Also, I understand that Vidy is trying to list in Binance via Community Coin Voting and yet ironically, they don't know how to handle and give importance to the community especially those bounty hunters that had exerted enough effort to promote their project. Anyway, I take this experience as a lesson that could serve me well on my crypto endeavors in the future.

at-least you get anything I received nothing I make contents for them

If I remember correctly, the bounty campaign was scheduled for 3 months but has been extended for another month and a half, making the total bounty period of 4.5 months or 18 weeks. So we don't really have a choice but to continue with it knowing that we will loose our stakes if we stop wearing their signature as per rules from the campaign specifically with signature campaign which i had joined.


Yes they did screw us badly and yet we can't do anything despite our appeals to reward us fairly since the Vidy team are steadfast on their resolve on not giving us a fair rewards, employing the alibi of Twitter bots that has joined the Twitter campaign which I have nothing whatsoever to do  with it.
Vidy is already on the market and has managed to list on Bithum Global, Gate.io, Houbi, etc. and now planning to list on Binance! I was even thinking if we could request our respected members of the community like you to download the bounty spreadsheet to verify the veracity of our allegations.  And finally, out of frustration, I've sold my 25k Vidy tokens for just about $85. For further reference, here is the link of the bounty Vidy thread. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bounty-vidycoin-decentralized-ad-network-50m-vidycoin-4562571

I assuming then that bounty hunters worked for 5 months with no pay?  If so, that really sucks.  In the past year or so I've seen so much of this crap that I wonder why bounty hunters would be willing to continue to do things like that anymore.  Especially if you're getting paid in tokens--some of them might be valuable if you can sell them in time, but if I'm not mistaken most of them end up being worthless.  It's risky work at best and at worst things turn out like this, being complete scams.

Yep, that's usually the final stage of the scam.  I've seen it quite a few times before, when bounty hunters start to grumble and potentially sabotage the scam project.  Not a good sign.

I'm tempted to tell you that at least you got something out of it, but that would be small comfort when they screwed you so badly.  If you don't mind my asking, what are those 25k tokens worth?  Is this even on the market yet?

Finally! The bounty participants can now at least air their side on what has been a deceitful bounty program conducted by Vidy team and being one of their participants, I can attest that they intentionally reduced all the stakes earned by bounty participants including me - which I believe I've got the highest stake on their signature campaign estimated at around 2M Vidy tokens but only got 25k tokens instead! This incident led me to believe that we should do our best to inform the community and warn them so that we can eradicate this kinds of deceitful acts and fight the crusade against these kinds of scammers!

Update: Vidy Admin is now censoring messages in the bounty group;

https://imgur.com/a/pPGs1Fj

yes I also got scammed in vidy bounty team is really bloody liar.

The Vidy Bounty lasted about 5 months. After that, the project team disappeared for almost half a year, without saying any word.

What was admiration when Vidy employees appeared at the most unexpected moment and without additional notifications added new rules a few months after the end of the bounty campaign.

The rules clearly stated that the distribution of tokens will be made 30 days after the end of sales. Sales ended December 31, 2018, according to information from the ICOBench. The rules also said that the KYC procedure is not required for participants.

As a result, at the time from July 1 to July 12, they made a mandatory rule to perform the KYC procedure. Naturally, 95% of all bountists were simply physically unable to receive their hard-earned reward.
I think this is pure rudeness, and such projects shouldn't be welcome in a crypto environment.

Having worked as a bounty manager for them, I can attest that this is indeed what happened. Many bounty hunters can too.

This is going to be a long-winded post, so bear with me.

We first approached Will (then one of the Vidy team) about Vidy's ongoing bounty as we felt like it wasn't having the traction it should have.

After a bit of messaging back and forth, we reached a deal that we would be paid 2% of the bounty as can be shown on the following image:

https://imgur.com/F86zv7Z

Will refers to having messaged the team about making us admins (hard to understand how they weren't aware of the bounty):

https://imgur.com/a/Ll1Bbp6

An issue with a bounty hunter appeared on the bounty channel and I was messaged by Will. I handled the situation and also messaged Alphonse (official member of Vidy's team) about it to which he replied and was very happy about the way the situation was handled. This conversation in the meanwhile was deleted by Alphonse.

Vidy extended the bounty without letting us know so I messaged Will about it.

https://imgur.com/a/Xt7r5Jt

We worked out another deal with Will about an extension of the bounty which raised the value from 2.0% to 2.3%.

https://imgur.com/a/hfycp3B

https://imgur.com/a/MoMNQMo

Then Will stopped replying to PMs once the bounty was finally over.

https://imgur.com/a/ON4oNWO

I also attempted to contact Alphonse since he was around the time of the bounty and was also aware that we were handling the bounty for Vidy.

He just redirected me to their CEO (Patrick):

https://imgur.com/a/BHdVl5E

https://imgur.com/a/XovJF0H

https://imgur.com/a/4B2rAY1

https://imgur.com/a/k6e5WFH

Fun fact: After Patrick's Vidy CEO mentioned to us Will a scammer the whole time (months after the bounty was concluded) he was still an admin of their main Telegram group (awkward):

https://imgur.com/a/j4zDxGi

Our arrangement was to simply handle the spreadsheets for the VIDY bounty. This essentially means that Bountycloud was responsible for accepting/rejecting members, checking the work (as per the rules). We did not reach an agreement to finalize the stakes after the bounty period, nor handle distribution of the bounty rewards.

In a private group with the project CEO, he vaguely indicates that his group had no idea what Will was doing, and that he was somehow a scammer. Bearing in mind that this "scammer" seemingly had access to their Bitcointalk account and was able to promote me to admin status within the bounty support group. I have attached a screenshot of this below.

https://i.imgur.com/OoIbOn5.png

In the same private chat with the group, we were promised partial compensation, though he didn't appear to indicate that the bounty hunters would be rewarded for their work based on the rules of the bounty.

https://i.imgur.com/fA6TpSS.png

Below is a screenshot of the VIDY bounty group, here we can see that Will was promoted to full admin status by Luke (the group creator). Luke also invited the VIDY CEO @pcboston to the group (the same person we were talking to in private chat—yes we did check the usernames were the same). I was promoted to admin by Luke, which indicates he and Will must have been in communication for this to happen.

https://i.imgur.com/EPKWSt4.png

However, the VIDY CEO argues that he didn't actually sign off on the bounty, indicating that it was being run and operated without his permission.

https://i.imgur.com/Mb0UYlQ.png

However, the bounty was openly promoted in the official VIDYCOIN group on numerous occasions by admins of the group, including Will and Luke. Similarly, Luke is directly mentioned as the contact for the bounty within the bounty thread itself;

https://i.imgur.com/y9FB91x.png

The quote can be seen in this thread here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.41703948

Interestingly, this specific part was edited out of the original thread, seemingly because the team was trying to break the link between official usernames and the bounty.

As the end of the initial bounty period drew to a close, we were then informed that they would be extending the bounty, but they refused to pay us any additional tokens. Because of this, we forfeited the role under the assumption that the VIDY team would duly take over the responsbility.

VIDY also scammed hundreds of bounty hunters. According to the bounty rules laid out here, bounty participants should have been paid on a stake-allocated basis. This means that whoever contributes the most valuable, high-quality work should be better rewarded. The bounty indicates that a total of 50 million VIDY were allocated to bounty hunters.

However, rather than paying people on a stake-basis, VIDY instead opted to send everyone between 10,000 and 20,000 VIDY each, even though numerous bounty hunters were owed FAR more.

Curiously, the bounty company attributes the reward reduction to removing bots from the campaign. However, regardless of this, the entire reward (50M) should be distributed on a stake basis. Removing the bots should mean that the remaining successful members receive higher, not lower rewards. Also, the CEO claims to have no knowledge of the bounty, and yet they clearly refer to it as "our bounty" in the below blog post associated with the official vidy.com domain. Similarly, the stats say that they removed ICO spamming accounts and banned accounts from the reward pool, however, the original bounty ruleset did not mention anything about disallowing this. Bountycloud knew this particular bounty rule-set was not sufficient to control spam, however, the team (or Will), refused our offer to revamp and relaunch the bounty under a better rule-set, refusing to pay our fee. Based on this, we believe the bounty hunters should be paid based on the original conditions of the bounty.

https://blog.vidy.com/vidycoin-bounty-campaign-announcement/

We have attached a screenshot below, just in case they try to edit the blog post.

https://i.imgur.com/jCwmGtd.png

Not only this, but they also enforced a new KYC-requirement that was not initially outlined in the bounty terms and conditions. Similarly, Will (Telegram admin) specifically noted that KYC was not required in the bounty group. Bear in mind that VIDY forced potentially hundreds of bounty hunters to go through KYC, with no prior warning, after months of absense, while enforcing a strict time limit (bounty hunters had 12-days to submit). This inevitably means numerous bounty hunters were not rewarded. Not only this, but 10,000 VIDY is currently worth about $20 as of writing. Pretty cheap way to acquire someone's personal data?

https://i.imgur.com/JrLoiph.png

I have collected some initial comments from affected bounty hunters, these are outlined below. These will be added when I return home in a couple of days.

Not only this, but VIDY also disappeared for months, leaving both us and the bounty hunters in limbo as to whether they will receive their payments.

I suspect that once VIDY was listed on an exchange, the aggregate value of the 50 million VIDY was too high for them to give away, leading them to change their mind. They forget that the bounty hunters helped their project succeed in the FIRST PLACE, and bounty payments should have been distributed well before the project was even listed.

If the CEO of the company didn't know that his subordinates had promised 0.5% of the total supply to a bounty, then this is a case of serious negligence, ignorance and mismanagement.

Now, this project is apparently up for consideration to be added to Binance;

https://www.binance.com/en/support/articles/360034599051

We do not think a company capable of such fraud and/or negligence should be listed on Binance, hence why we are posting this message as a warning to the community, to Binance and to any other potential partners that are currently in negotiations with Vidy.

I encourage media outlets, influencers, bounty hunters and anybody else concerned with maintaining justice in the space to share this news, ensuring that everybody knows exactly what they are dealing with when working with or using Vidy.