• Forum has been upgraded, all links, images, etc are as they were. Please see Official Announcements for more information

GetFreeDash campaign must be stopped ASAP

George Donnelly said:
That's a challenge to get any certainty of the user actually doing it but there is off the shelf software that can be deployed that makes it mandatory for the user to, say, share something on Facebook, before proceeding to getting what they want.

Another valuable action is when a user opts into a legally administered mailing list. If we had a mailing list of everyone who had gotten free Dash, we could be doing wonderful things with it.
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree the emails are incredibly valuable because gathering those would solve several issues and give us a means to contact each user whenever we wanted e.g. if a new training program was released or if we have a new campaign we would like the users to be involved with e.g. viral marketing campaign.

If we used a professional email handling service such as https://www.aweber.com then they would go through a email validation procedure. This procedure involves sending the recipient an email that they would need to click on to be validated. If the email has been used previously it will not be added to the list. If they do not validate the email by clicking on the validation they are also not added to the mailing list. This means now fraudsters would have to have valid emails for each attempt of getting free DASH.

The next question is if the same person or small group of people are undertaking the fraud it is likely they would be using the same IP address or they would be using a small subset of IP addresses e.g through a VPN. I would need to check but I think the Aweber service also reports the IP address and location of the person. We could ensure that the validations could ONLY come from a Venezuela IP address and this would also eliminate the VPN issues because VPNs typically use different countries. We could make it such that the validation of the address MUST be a Venezuela IP and it must be unique.

Aweber also has guidelines on how to ensure that the addresses of emails are properly handled. Aweber servers are also whitelisted with many of the mail handling giants to ensure the mail gets through.

Adding email validation in addition to other validations may also make it considerably more difficult for fraudsters because now they would have to do the following:

a) have a source for unique SIM cards
b) continuously setup new email addressess and go through a validation for each one.
c) find a way to have unique IP addresses in Venezuela every time they sign up.
d) would have to go through a double validation procedure with Aweber where the email address is only added to the mailing list once it is validated by the owner. This is time consuming for a fraudster to do.

Now a fraudster could do all of the above however now it is beginning to be a lot more work for that $0.5

IMEI validation not SIM validation
The other thing I think we ought to consider is validating not on the SIM but on the IMEI number of the phone itself instead of SIM validation. In this way fraudsters would need to have a source to a large number of phones in order to scam the system. SMS cards are cheap. Smartphones are not. It would not be economically possible to buy phones to get $.50 worth of DASH.

I do not know if there is an automated way to validate IMEI numbers?

If we could also then find a way to automate the validation procedures of the email against an identity. The information would not need to be stored but simply validated then we wipe the data to ensure confidentiality of each user.

These are just a few first ideas.
 
Last edited:
How do you validate an IMEI via SMS tho? I can send any IMEI I want over SMS.

IMEIs can be changed and faked, based on some quick research.

What if someone gets paid off in the cell phone company in one of these developing world countries and manages to wield hundreds or thousands of numbers simultaneously?

Trying to nail down real people identities is very hard, it's slippery in fact. It's easy to spend a lot of money and time trying to do it, but if instead we just focus on the bare minimum there and work on getting people doing useful things for the Dash network, I think the sybil attack protection will be good enough and the Dash network will be able to benefit.

(Nailing down real identities is dangerous, too. It can make minority groups easy to identify and target, cf. the Rohingya.)

Think a constellation of incentives, like joining a mailing list, taking actions in response to emails, social media likes and posts, what about spending some Dash? What about signing up a merchant?

This can get very complex very fast, of course, which is a downside.
 
hi,

I know there have been a lot of discussions on the pros and cons of getfreedash.com proposal and I am not going to comment on them indivuadlly, all I want to do is continue my work (provided the MNOs let me ) and let it speak for itself.

As this point, I am pretty disinterested with criticisms or compliments ( that's a big personal learning for me, however).

we have now resolved most fraud and now going with good monitoring of user activity.

The ingenious ways fraudsters attempt to claim free dash is quite a learning experience, and also an indicator of strong interest in dash.

I hope dash community values the learnings of this exercise and attempts to build up further strategies based on this as I still strongly feel, reaching the bottom of the pyramid with digital currency ( at a low cost ) is the most important driver for mass adoption.
 
@Dashmaximalist

Good for you for answering. I would recommend you to inform the community of payments to your website's members made since April 1 and address the accusation that people who have completed the sign-up procedure of getfreedash.com have not been paid. This is the critical factor. It is what you were paid to do and cannot be ignored. Doing so simply means you are pocketing the money paid for services to be rendered.
 
yes, we will publish the results soon was busy with a lot of things. about the complaints, we froze 40,000 accounts and reverted a lot of transactions so there is bound to be complaints, some of them are genuinely worried, but most have referred fraudsters ( knowingly or unknowingly ) which we are explaining to them.

Now about pocketing the money, Here's a guideline to do it:
the best way to pocketing money is to take the money and keep quiet, never go to great lengths of reporting fraud ever, not worth it. Simply pretend that things are fine and make money and so most people keep quiet, in the end, the reward for honesty and hard work is nothing.
 
Last edited:
Assuming there is 80% fraud in Dashmaximalists campaign, the cost is $5 per new signup.

@algodon.franelas wants to be paid $160000 for getting 1600 people to attend some random inflated bills conference.
The cost- $100 per person, a months salary in venezuela.

There is a 20 gap times gap.

Either frenelas is ripping us off or @Dashmaximalist is a genius. Or maybe both are true.
As for smartcash, bringing it up is pointless because most of the venezuelans are in bed with many different coins.
 
Argon31 said:
Assuming there is 80% fraud in Dashmaximalists campaign, the cost is $5 per new signup.

@algodon.franelas wants to be paid $160000 for getting 1600 people to attend some random inflated bills conference.
The cost- $100 per person, a months salary in venezuela.

There is a 20 gap times gap.

Either frenelas is ripping us off or @Dashmaximalist is a genius. Or maybe both are true.
As for smartcash, bringing it up is pointless because most of the venezuelans are in bed with many different coins.
Click to expand...

It's an apples vs oranges thing to compare GetFreeDash and Dash Venezuela. With GFD, someone gets 50 cents of Dash. End of story. With Dash VZ, selected people, mostly entrepreneurs it seems, are being educated and immersed in a nascent Dash ecosystem.

It's like comparing buying a second-hand physics textbook versus taking a college-level physics class complete with hands-on lab sessions at a university.

Both approaches undoubtedly have value, but to compare one to the other may not lead to useful conclusions.
 
Dashmaximalist said:
the best way to pocketing money is to take the money and keep quiet
Click to expand...
How one might pocket the money, say by keeping as quiet as Shrem, which you have for the past 4 days, or by screaming about it from the mountain top is irrelevant. Either approach is a means to the same end: someone pockets the money.
 
Argon31 said:
Assuming there is 80% fraud in Dashmaximalists campaign, the cost is $5 per new signup.

@algodon.franelas wants to be paid $160000 for getting 1600 people to attend some random inflated bills conference.
The cost- $100 per person, a months salary in venezuela.

There is a 20 gap times gap.

Either frenelas is ripping us off or @Dashmaximalist is a genius. Or maybe both are true.
As for smartcash, bringing it up is pointless because most of the venezuelans are in bed with many different coins.
Click to expand...

I just want to add one point to this, gone are the days where dash could assume Venezuela would be an easy kill, we need to have a clear strategy to capture this market. At the end of the day its about getting the first 1 million users , whichever coin does it first has an unbeatable first mover advantage ( think of Uber spends billions in free rides )
 
Dashmaximalist said:
I just want to add one point to this, gone are the days where dash could assume Venezuela would be an easy kill, we need to have a clear strategy to capture this market. At the end of the day its about getting the first 1 million users , whichever coin does it first has an unbeatable first mover advantage ( think of Uber spends billions in free rides )
Click to expand...

Do any of us really know what constitutes an unbeatable advantage in the market for cryptocurrencies? Have there been any studies? I don't think we can do anything more than speculate.

Multi-tenanting, for example, is a major thing in crypto (on the part of the consumer), because there are at least 42 coins they can (shape)shift back and forth to/from at will. And with multi-coin mobile wallets like Coinomi, getting merchants to accept their 2nd, 3rd and 43rd coins is much less difficult than getting them to accept their first.

Building brand (tribal) loyalty is everything, which means plugging the users into media, meetups, influencers, conferences, the whole thing.

This is why it is so important that airdrops be tied to getting the recipient into email and social media marketing campaigns - so the airdrop buys us their ear, which we can then use to get into their heart.
 
I agree with that, airdrops followed other things is usually the best, but airdrop is one of most important. airdrop builds the network.
think of it as a laying the internet network's wires, laying the network is the dirty and non-glamorous work, it involves taking risks, finding the smart routes to lay your network and so on, but hey if the network was laid, we wouldn't be having this conversation to begin with.
 
Likewise, if we gift them a phone/phone line but they switch their service to Ma Bitcoin, all we accomplished was to subsidize the adoption of other crypto(s) by failing to think through and execute on the entire marketing process.

Because we need to not just get Dash into people's hands. We need to build the Dash brand in their minds and place them into a vibrant Dash ecosystem that gives them dozens of reasons to remain loyal to Dash.

This was exactly my suggestion for improvement on David Hay's $2 million airdrop proposal, too.

Crypto is not just new money. It's what you can do with it, it's the other people who are using it. It's the brand. It's Coke vs Pepsi, ATT vs MCI, Apple vs Microsoft, McDonalds vs BK, etc. Where users can multi-tenant and where the product is identical for many use cases (sure there is InstantSend, that helps, but...), branding is what we need to build because branding is what will keep the user holding and coming back to Dash.
 
I think I differ with you, money is a network and not a product ( like a phone network or uber taxi network ) , so once you sign 1 million people and say 100k merchants, it gets insanely difficult for the next coin to take on this market, so ideally we should spend 70% of the money on building network and rest on branding and merchant acquisition, unfortunately, today we are doing it the other way hoping users would come once you build a merchant network, that rarely happens. The merchants that come on board now are simply in for the free ride I am afraid.
 
Dashmaximalist said:
I think I differ with you, money is a network and not a product ( like a phone network or uber taxi network ) ,
Click to expand...

Many phone networks are monopolistic tho, as in there is one company that owns the all the cables. Or, in cell networks, there are only a few government-approved companies that can offer their services on the market.

We don't have that advantage. People can shapeshift from Dash to Bitcoin to Cardano in seconds with a few clicks, and be gone forever, completely forgetting about Dash.

Likewise, with Uber, there is cut-throat competition within the Uber network that is constantly pushing prices for drivers down. And the Uber network is centrally managed to the benefit of Uber Technologies Inc.

Nor do we have a central entity managing outcomes in the crypto world. Tho we do have the cutthroat competition among cryptos (or the potential for it).

So, neither the phone nor the Uber analogies work to our benefit.

That said, like Uber, it is important that we seed cars on the road (merchants) before the utility of the network reaches a critical mass. The same was true for AirBNB, who seeded a stock of accomodations (merchants for us) by raiding Craigslist. Facebook also frontloaded supply of use opportunities in order to build demand for new members with a bowling pin strategy that focused on universities before they opened it to the public.

When you're in Colombia, money is not a product because you only have 1 choice: the Colombian peso. Ditto in most every other country out there.

But when you are in crypto land, money is absolutely a product because you have dozens of viable choices, if not hundreds. Money must become a product if it wishes to remain competitive. Clearly Dash MNOs see this because so far they have financed a strong brand for Dash.

Dashmaximalist said:
so once you sign 1 million people and say 100k merchants, it gets insanely difficult for the next coin to take on this market
Click to expand...

The truth is closer to the opposite.

Once I know there are 1 million people who are crypto savvy, they become a marketplace I can now market to cheaply. The hard work has already been done in educating them and getting them to see the value of crypto. I can now offer them what I claim to be a superior product.

If you want to see a first mover that got blown out of the water, look at Kodak, MySpace, Flickr...


Dashmaximalist said:
so ideally we should spend 70% of the money on building network and rest on branding and merchant acquisition, unfortunately, today we are doing it the other way hoping users would come once you build a merchant network, that rarely happens. The merchants that come on board now are simply in for the free ride I am afraid.
Click to expand...

Building network is branding. Because a network is only a network if there is cohesion.

I do question the utility of some of the branding being done. It's not like we're Exxon so running feel-good spots on a metaphorical PBS makes me scratch my head, but who knows. At this point, when it comes to mass adoption, we're all fumbling in the dark.

Have you had a chance to read James Currier's work on nfx by the way? Extremely useful stuff. Here is one introductory article:

https://www.nfx.com/post/network-effects-manual
 
Dashmaximalist said:
I just want to add one point to this, gone are the days where dash could assume Venezuela would be an easy kill, we need to have a clear strategy to capture this market. At the end of the day its about getting the first 1 million users , whichever coin does it first has an unbeatable first mover advantage ( think of Uber spends billions in free rides )
Click to expand...

Really? Doesn't it strike you a little odd that you say this at the same time as having proposals up for voting for both Dash and Smartcash? We should fund your project because there is going to be competition from other coins (also you)?
 
TroyDASH said:
We should fund your project because there is going to be competition from other coins (also you)?
Click to expand...
You should fund the proposal that offers the best SMS-OTP solution for Dash.
Getfreedash solution is the only available SMS-OTP solution until now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top