Polkadot Anti-scam Team Bounty 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 two years now and has helped fund multiple anti-scam tasks, whose details can be found here
This top-up will enable us to continue with our anti-scam efforts as well as expand the initiative to protect the Polkadot community from as many areas of scam as possible.
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
Report of spends since the last top-up can be found here
Thank you.
Comments (9)
Requested
Proposal Passed
Summary
0%
Aye
0%
Nay
Aye (91)0.0 DOT
Support0.0 DOT
Nay (40)0.0 DOT
This seems to be the top-up for the anti-scam bounty (Bounty 11). We would mainly like to know more details about the proposed budget as some of the items seem quite elevated. Specially for the education materials, 25k in education materials, 50k for expansion of educational campaigns. It says that it will be mostly on youtube, Polkaverse and some other sites (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PTJEYtQeUe4XTg0zioX13gISuZ78bMQkMEDORf899RA/edit). How is this going to be amplified so that the expenditure is justified by reaching enough people that this material is meant for. We have already seen tons of projects produce material never to be watched by anyone.
Hello @saxemberg
First of all, thank you for taking the time to study and review our top-up proposal.
About the $25k for the new Milestones, you can see more details in this document.
Regarding the 50k for the expansion of our campaign, we have some ideas to implement in the future. At the moment they are just that, ideas. We will prepare a document to reflect this better.
Anyway, the way our Bounty works is through Child Curators and General Curators. This means that no implementer receives rewards before finishing a task, which is then reviewed by the Child Curator and the General Curators in second place. So, if in the future those ideas are not implemented, no one will be rewarded for it and those funds will go to other tasks, meaning that our Bounty will last a little longer.
I would also like to comment on the transparency of our Bounty. You can see in detail where every DOT we have received from the treasury has gone (see point 4 of the proposal).
Thank you again for your time.
Acknowledging the hard work and thoughtful reporting that has gone into our anti-scam measures, it's clear that our current strategy isn't delivering the expected results, with an average viewership of only 50. This suggests a need to reconsider our approach. While the proposal for additional funding is well-intentioned, it appears to be unnecessarily large, especially considering that a significant portion of the existing budget remains unused. Instead, we should direct our efforts towards more scalable and cost-effective solutions, such as automation and filtering, to ensure our anti-scam initiatives are both impactful and sustainable.
@ROTKO.NET
Hi, thanks thanks for taking the time to review our proposal. Based on your comment I do get the feeling you only focus on a very small subset of the things we do.
The largest chunk of work we do is finding and eradicating scams before they can be used to scam users. This includes sites, fake wallets in the app store, fake social media profiles mimicing polkadot support etc.. We are btw actually also working on tools to automize the detection of phishing and with this top up actually intend to do a MVP with phishphort. At this point however we still find nothing works as good as having a few dedicated users also go over it as hackers show time and time again to be very good in fooling tools so far sadly.
We also spend time helping victims who fell for a scam and help retrieving funds by contacting exchanges and using tracking tools.
So when you say we don't deliver the expected results with a viewership of 50 I get the feeling you only look at a very small subset of what we do. Also I want to point out that our treasury will be mostly empty after this month so what do you mean we have a significant portion of the existing budget left? Also note we used the current budget for over a year and we intend to do the same with this top-up.
If you have some feedback on how we could do things better I do however warmly welcome you to brainstorm with us on how to improve on things.