Protecting Harmony Community

Funding Proposals Grants
1

Propose Overview

The proposal is to form a two-year partnership with Harmony to identify and remove online scammers targeting the community and to remove them.

The problems

The two most popular and dangerous social / messenger applications for investors are Telegram and Discord. Scammers are targeting this area in an effort to get money from victims by pretending to offer technical support. According to my research, for every help request that you post on Telegram, you get 4-5 scam messages. You will eventually be persuaded and directed to send your seed phrase using their scam phishing site.

In addition, Harmony has 41000 members on its official verified telegram group, while a scam group has 26000 members. There are currently 26000 victims that are very vulnerable, yet they are unaware of their situation. Unfortunately, this doesn’t end here. There are many other groups with thousands of members who are victims on a regular basis.

The result is that one of our beloved Harmonaut will lose all his money, while the scammer will sell the stolen token, resulting in affecting everyone since the price will drop.

I know that this seems unbelievable, but there are many people who have their funds stolen every day. I have seen it myself, even in the Harmony Official Telegram group. This is very sad to see, and the victim’s first question will be “how do I get it back?”. Even though there is nothing you can do since this is the nature of blockchain, this will leave the investor depressed, frustrated, and lost, probably for a long time.

Fixing those issues is our Mission

Due to my experience in content protection and exposure to different departments such as legal and investigations, I intend to create a company focused on protecting various crypto communities by catching the bad guys for them. Considering Harmony is my favourite project, and has the best community, I intend to make Harmony our first project to defend.

The first step to achieve this is by finding those types of websites. Since scammers like to pretend to be customer support, they will end up falling in the trap set by myself and my team when we pretend to ask for help. They will then offer to give us their malicious link in hopes of scamming us, but then everything will be over. Once we obtain this information, we can find out who they are, where they are located, and who is hosting their domain. All this information will assist us in reporting them and removing their website. Furthermore, we will create a database where we can store all those people and keep track of their previous sins in case they reappear. If necessary, we can also file a lawsuit against them.

Second, we will try to remove fake groups by getting in touch with Telegram and Discord as a company, and by proving our partnership with Harmony to protect their communities, we can then attempt to remove the fake groups.

As our database expands with malicious websites, we will crawl Google for similar websites using similar keywords , in order to find and remove them.

Proposal ask

$125,000

2 Likes
2

The idea is nice, but I don’t understand how to you propose a solution?

More precisely, are you considering an infrastructure that will scan and detect such fraudulent sites with a bot and automatically notify about these sites?

Or will all this be done entirely by human power?

3

Hi @ahmetgumustekin ,

Thank you for your questions.

Let me begin by telling you a little about what I do. I am a developer currently working for a large company, and my day-to-day responsibilities are to scrape websites for content that violates the terms of service, and those records are forwarded to a separate team for processing and removal. We also deal with content posted on Telegram and Discord, and I believe we can eliminate all scam groups on those platforms as well.

Regarding the Harmony official group, since many scammers are also present there, we intend to manually ask for help by saying, for example, that a transaction did not go through. Then they will pretend to help us and eventually tell us to go to their fraudulent website where the victims are asked to enter their seed phrase. Our first piece of evidence is now in hand, we can move forward with determining who is behind that website. In my estimation, we can catch about 50 scammers per week on the official channel. As we catch more and more scammers, we gain a lot of experience, and we can then consider creating bots that will speak directly to those scammers. So we will intend to automate this process as well.

Getting back to your question, yes we do intend to create an infrastructure.

In order to do this, I intend to set up a database where we can store everything we do and track it. Here is a simple example: Who is the person trying to scam, what is the website, when we found it and when it is removed. In case this person reappears with a different website, we will be able to take legal action against them. It will be done with the help of a lawyer that we will hire.

In addition, we will automate a robot that will scrape search engines for fraudulent sites with similar keywords to those in our database. Our robot will run once or twice a week, and the results will be processed further.

As a result, I expect to see a decrease in scammers and a much safer community.

Thank you again for your questions. I hope I have answered them clearly. If you have any other concerns, please let me know.

1 Like
4

It is an interesting project that I am not sure of its feasibility at the same time.

It would be nice to have this kind of system that works across all networks, not just Harmony.

It would even be perfect to have an infrastructure that tracks and reports scammed wallets and monitors and reports on contracts and live projects related to transfers from them.

5

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

We plan to monitor and work with other communities as well. I believe this is a positive step forward since we can’t undo things that have already happened, but we can prevent them from happening again.

Regarding scammed wallets - it will be hard to report these since we won’t know until a victim reports it. Furthermore, since the exchange will have to block withdrawals from these wallets, there’s little we can do here.

Thanks again.

6

Unfortunately, your proposal is not ready for a Launch grant based on the guidelines at Apply for Grants or DAO due to the following reasons:

Applications of each launch must have prototyped a feature-full product. Harmony helps incubate these founding teams with product development, fundraising, and talent recruit. We recommend a $50K equity-free contribution each:

$10K after launching a feature-complete product on our testnet
$10K after forming a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with our DAOs
$10K after launching on our mainnet with audit
$10K after 1K daily active users (with launch video, full PR promotion)
$10K after 10k daily active users (with a detailed roadmap, governance process)

We hope you continue to build on this concept and circle back when it is ready to be discussed further. Thank you for choosing Harmony.

7

Hello @HarmonyUniverse , thank you for getting back to me so quickly. I intend to continue developing this concept and build a prototype as well. Meanwhile, I was wondering if you would like to see the concept posted under Launch or Partners when I am ready to share it again. Considering this is a concept aimed at providing a service, it would be helpful to know where it belongs.

Thanks again, and if you have any other suggestions or feedback, I would greatly appreciate it!