I also think the anti-scam bounty needs a full review and investigation.
The earlier Polkadot Anti-Scam Team 2025 Top-Up proposal didn’t pass [check here] but worth check the comments. Finally they managed to get the top-approved [check here]
Are we spending $9000 per month in curators? I just can’t believe it
Why abdulbee was paid $1500 in october 2025?
Why frankywild, grizzlyadams375 and frankywild got paid $1800 each in october 2025?
I think this guys and pastaman are also curators in other bounties..
Same people everywhere. What kind of joke is this?
Here you can check amount spent by child bounty? [spreadsheet]
Why is ChainPatrol getting paid $6500/month and frankywild $3800/month for Detection and takedown of scam/phishing? Are they actually handling a large volume of genuine takedowns, or are they charging excessively for removing a few random websites — some of which could theoretically be created beforehand?
Why is frankywild getting paid $1800/month as team member plus $3800/month for taking down alleged scam sites? Isn’t this double spending?
→ Clearly not their mission.
→ Don’t know if they have other reach but definitely useless.
I summed up concerns here during rejected ref #1422:
I reckon support to victims is useful obviously, but this bounty always tried to overdeliver where it’s not asked and get extra funding for a super team of people where a very small dedicated team would have been enough.
My feeling is that anyone proposing to close this bounty would be supported by the community and current DVs (1000 DOT decision deposit).
The Polkadot Anti-Scam Team cracks me up.
They haven’t actually stopped a single scam, as far as I can tell. I genuinely have no idea what they’re doing over there…
Also if you pay someone to take down phishing sites you incentives them to make sure there are always phising sites.
Hi, Megadot, I’m happy to answer all your questions.
The average expenditure since the last top-up for managers+curators has been around $8,400 per month, one of the lowest rates in the ecosystem (if not the lowest). So I don’t understand why you find that number surprising.
As for being curators in other bounties, I see nothing wrong with that as long as the work is done with complete transparency. I’ve never understood some people’s concern about being part of more than one bounty. If you are capable, why not?
ChainPatrol is an external company we hired to help us detect and remove profiles/groups/blogs/etc. on social media. Their fee has been negotiated and reduced from $6,500 to $3,500 since October.
The $3,800 you refer to on my part is for removing fraudulent/malicious sites that target the Polkadot ecosystem. It is not a fixed amout that I receive, I only get rewards for the sites removed, the average reward that implementers receive is about $8.7 per site removed. If you knew how to create a domain, you would not mention creating them in advance to remove them, as that would be much more expensive than the reward itself, so it makes no sense.
I will paste you the last past of my answer to the OP:
“The average reward that implementers receive is about $8.7 per site removed. If you knew how to create a domain, you would not mention creating them in advance to remove them, as that would be much more expensive than the reward itself, so it makes no sense.”
Regarding your work as curator or administrative tasks you have been paid $44,200 in last 40 months (apr23 - oct25) which makes an average of $1,100/month:
What administrative task do you exactly do as curator/team member to justify this pay? Isn’t this double spending?
Regarding your multiple roles as both moderator and curator in other bounties, it seems you may not have enough time to fully manage all these responsibilities and justify the payments you are receiving.
Take a look at this @SAXEMBERG — you voted AYE on the top-up, so you might want to reconsider your vote next time.
I have taken down 18,240 websites since we started this bounty in 2022. The rewards have been decreasing every year thanks to the improvements we have made to the process. Therefore, the average reward per website was higher when we started. You can see all this information in the same spreadsheet you are looking at. Everything is public and transparent. No tricks.
Did you know that between 200,000 and 400,000 websites are created every day around the world? Of those, thousands target cryptocurrencies in general. So do the math.
The average $1,100 per month that I earn as one of the managers of this bounty is not for detecting and removing websites. It is for managing the bounty. Do you think that’s a high figure? What do you think is fair?
All websites submitted by pastaman, myself, or other implementers are public and reviewed by four curators (none of whom are implementers) to ensure they are eligible and removed.
To be honest, I only see bad faith in this thread. Everything we do is public and completely transparent.
Thank you for the clarification. I have a couple of factual follow-ups:
Do you have any estimate of how much money Polkadot users have actually lost to the phishing sites you’ve taken down? Even a rough range or methodology would help contextualize the impact of the bounty.
Are all 18,240 sites specifically Polkadot-related phishing sites, or does that number include general crypto phishing sites as well? Understanding the scope would make the figures easier to evaluate.
Beyond the spreadsheet, is there any way for community members to independently verify takedown counts? Knowing what can be double-checked externally would help clarify how transparent the system truly is.
Can this process ( and many others that are happening in openGov) be automated? Let’s give work of machines to machines, and retain human work for humans.
What other major protocols, and our direct competitors, do related to this ? And how much do they spend?
Parity people, the legion of openGov public officers that are filling spreadsheets, notion pages, CRMs, clicking buttons here and there, and in general doing manual low value work, could and should be also a target to your products. openGov needs a on-chain digitalization investment package. Automate, automate, automate.
Thx for the clarification.
The readability of your document is confusing then.
If you put “Reward”, then it’s a reward. Some of the amounts are payments here?
If you don’t indicate the frequency “Annual”, “Monthly” or “1 time”, how are we supposed to understand the document ?
Ok so the “X badge” is an annual payment, it’s not a “reward”.
For payments, maybe don’t put names in front of it, it’s confusing, or label it differently.
That will avoid to sum amounts for people and mixed compensations with payments.
We need clarity in documents that are provided to the community, thx in advance.
NB: no one forgot, your ref passed because of 1 big whale lol. .
There is no proof that those sites were fraudulent or malicious.
There is no proof that those sites were taken down.
I also see may many are subdomains when taking down the main domain is enough.
Where are the reports to the hosting providers?
Point 1: That’s literally impossible to know, how can you know how many people would be scammed by a site if that wasn’t taken down? But since February 2024, a total of $2.8M have been compromised by victims contacting us. Nobody can know if that number would be much higher or not without all those sites taken down, it’s impossible. It’s like asking how many people would be killed in a year if there was no police.
Point 2: Yes, all sites are targeting Polkadot or its ecosystem (like wallets, parachains, etc.)
Point 3: Any person can verify the takedown, just go to the spreadsheet and open any site that is marked as taken down.
You already know that we don’t get rewards for sites added that are not targeting Polkadot or its ecosystem, as we told you many times in the past, but you prefer to throw shit here to bait people.
Of course there are proofs of each site taken down, you just need to check the spreadsheet. I’m tired of repeating the same thing again and again, so this will probably be my last post.
You already know that we don’t get rewards for sites added that are not targeting Polkadot or its ecosystem
Happy to learn that, 1st time i read that. Good to know and fair enough.
But don’t start to insult people, it’s just going against you unfortunately. We’re just exchanging information based on a document which we try to read and understand.
You didn’t answer about the X badge.
If you don’t know, you could have it through the Polkadot account (for free), which certifies the legit accounts in the ecosystem. No need to pay 2000$.
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