Reward for finding and taking down scam sites as part of the Anti-Scam Community Initiative (3)

The Anti-Scam Response Team has come up with an initiative to incentivize community members to find and report to DNS registrars’ scam and phishing sites 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 and reporting a scam site. Reporting it to the DNS registrar and (optionally) adding it to the GitHub phishing repo was a separate action with a separate reward.

• The reward for filing a takedown request was 10 DOT split among all users who filed one before the site was taken down. This was soon changed to the more realistic 1 DOT per request, after a recommendation from the beneficiary of this tip:

Discord user dubstard#0008 (15iZD84rHAjuvaiKXBj2YAEPRJ8Tt4VS1M79HsYhieTvtJR4) has been doing excellent work since this initiative started: having found and taken down 11 sites single-handedly and reporting one more that is still live. Furthermore, he has provided valuable feedback that has helped improve the process during this testing phase and suggested other users that might be a good addition to the initiative.

For all his efforts, we recommend that he receive the full 10 DOT for the three sites he took down single-handedly before the calibration of the rewards took place. We feel this is even more deserved if we also consider that he is an active member of the community, who for several months now finds, reports and takes down dangerous sites targeting users of our community.

Taking this into consideration and based on the reward amounts and the prerequisites as they were in each phase of this initiative, we propose that his tip is for the amount of 50 DOT. Taking into account the 20% finder’s fee, we recommend to the Council that the total amount of the tip is 62.5 DOT.

The proposed reward is analyzed below

The curators of this initiative:

• @ccris02#4626: Discord moderator on the Polkadot server, Polkadot and Kusama validator and the submitter of this proposal

• @Michalis#6840: Web3 Foundation employee and member of the Anti-Scam Report Team who leads this initiative

Attest that they have verified all the information submitted by the beneficiary based on the rules that applied at each time.