Reward for finding and reporting Telegram scam groups as part of the Anti-Scam Community Initiative (1)

The Anti-Scam Response Team has come up with an initiative to incentivize community members to find and report to Telegram scam groups and channels that plague the Polkadot ecosystem.

This initiative aims to make use of the sub-bounties pallet once it’s part of the runtime to issue rewards, but in the meantime it is being tested out with a small number of participants and the rewards are issued with tips. This tip proposal is for such a reward.

This process has been revamped since this testing phase began and it’s described in detail in this Google form - that is now the sole method of participating in the initiative.

However, the process has changed since it was first implemented and the most notable changes are:

A user could get a reward of 1 DOT for simply finding a scam group. Reporting it to Telegram was a separate action with a separate reward.
The reward for reporting it to Telegram was 5 DOT split among all users who reported it before the group/channel was flagged as scam. This has now changed to 1 DOT per report.
The reporting process has been significantly revamped to make identification of reported sites much easier.

Telegram user @Suguangrui (15cgCPCLyyaNV2PuE9uEciQoWzvQVC3PxCJRfn3CtqFkzpRa) has been doing excellent work since this initiative started. He has found and reported several groups resulting in many of them or their admins receiving the “scam” flag by Telegram, as well as participating actively in the initiative and providing feedback.

However, the process of tracking which groups had been found by which user and which ones were reported to Telegram was not very well structured in the first phase of the initiative. As a result, it’s not easy to know which groups precisely have been flagged by Telegram or which users contributed to that.

For this reason we propose that the user receives a tip of 15 DOT for the sum of their efforts, also taking into consideration the 5 DOT reward per flagging that applied until now.

The curators of this initiative:

@JackEsky: Active member of the community and admin of the official Polkadot Telegram channel. He’s been actively fighting Telegram scams for several months.

@michalisFr: Web3 Foundation employee and member of the Anti-Scam Report Team who leads this initiative

Both attest that they have verified as best they could all the information submitted by the beneficiary based on the rules that applied at each time and support this proposal with the associated amount.