Polkadot Anti-Scam Team 2025 Top-up
Dear Community,
This referendum aims to top up the Anti-Scam Bounty, whose aim is to protect the community from scams by tracking/pruning scam activities, supporting scam victims, and promoting user safety via educational initiatives. The anti-scam bounty has been running for three years now and has helped fund multiple anti-scam tasks.
Details of this proposal, including what we have achieved so far, our future goals, and an estimated break-down of the requested top-up, can be found in the proposal document.
Spending Analysis and Budget Request
Requested allocation: $543,712-$80,000(initial 2025 funds) = $463,712 at 08/02/2025 EMA7 $4.951/DOT = 93,660 DOT
A general view of the bounty and spending analysis can be found here.
Thanks to some automation tools created by our members and our possible partnership with third parties, we have managed to lower the budget of our team by 30% as you can see below.
For more details, see the full table here.
Comments (21)
Requested
Proposal Failed
Summary
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Aye (40)0.0 DOT
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Nay (49)0.0 DOT
Ok, that’s an important one.
I’m gonna share which is my own position, this is the one I’m defending in Le Nexus DV.
There is a double spending position for different members of the Moderation Bounty and the anti-scam bounty.
If You are moderating Polkadot socials, you are also fighting against scams, which is perfectly normal.
-> Same mission. Moderation team scope.
I’ve been through the phishing list on Polkadot.js.org and I was very surprised to discover that this list is covering not only the Polkadot ecosystem but the entire blockchain industry. The Polkadot phishing websites are not even 1%. And fewer and fewer occurrences of Polkadot can be found in the list over time.
Is it the mission to cover the entire industry? Are the other ecosystems doing this? No.
-> Over extended scope.
The outreach track. To sum up, it’s not a mission of this bounty, but the Marketing Bounty mission
-> Marketing Bounty scope.
Education.
I reckon education is important to prevent people falling into scams, but I feel a lack of accessibility for the targeted audience.
Are newbies able to find the delivered documents and vids? Are the documents available on the support website or wiki?
The cost to produce the articles are also arguable. These contents should be covered by Wagmedia for instance.
-> Double spending. Wagmedia scope
Conclusion
I acknowledge that this bounty made a good job in the early days, but it feels like the bounty is trying now to extend its scope and overlapping existing bounties in order to maintain activity.
The maintenance mode, in which the bounty is now, does not require a team of 15 people anymore.
Missions should be restricted to the original scope only, which should help drastically reduce the team and save money for the Treasury.
To continue, the bounty should provide a large cut proposal and simplify its mission compared to the requested amount.
A 66% to 75% cut would be adequate for the maintenance. And work only on Polkadot scams, not the whole industry.
Cheers.
@SuperDupont
Hi thanks for the feedback. A few clarifications:
half a million dollars to ban bots and create videos with 10 views
now that's money well spent
@12WeN_qZHen I don't know where you get this idea from but as Franky says the content is only about $3k a year so only a very small part of our funding. As for the other part in 2024 alone we have among other things:
— taken down over 13k scamsites
— traced $1.3M stolen funds of which we recovered $161400
— maintain the polkadot.js antiscam repo
I expect the tracking / recovering stolen funds to go up in 2025 as its a relatively new thing we do