titor Thank you for your question, Titor.
Truth be told, there are countless of portals out there right now doing exactly what I will be doing. Thousands of content and educational material that will help prevent future crime can be found across billions of Google search results.
Why is fraud still being committed today? There's millions of content out there in order to educate people to be vigilant, yet crimes still happen.
Why am I doing this when there's already all that work already done? Well for over 2 years of moderating this community I have noticed that when it comes to safety and security, it's kind of a one-way street with how people think they are secure. They either believe they won't be scammed because they know of some tips and guidelines, or they they truly believe someone will be able to fix their mistake if they ever make one.
This misconception is as real as it gets in the real world, as the only true way to protect yourself is you. Adding onto the fact that crypto-currency is new, not many people know it and the educational curve on crypto itself is quite steep for some people.
As you and everyone in the community are on the front-line of the Stellar Network, we are all defenders of the community. Each of us has an obligation to protect each other, and by doing that we must first protect ourselves. It's all a chain-effect. Similarly, when a scam appears, you can see this in live action with community members sticking out for each other.
This project is made to do specifically just that:
- MARKETING MARKETING MARKETING! We will be doing a marketing campaign that literally just educates people on simple tips. It's not as easy as telling people to stay vigilant, sometimes you need to do marketing campaigns or games so others can learn, have fun and share their knowledge they learned. I believe marketing to new-comers is a priority for Stellarscam.report and it's one of our main goals for this proposal.
- become a beacon of verification for others to verify scams between official links (usually this is a one-time event where they educate themselves on security guidelines; always good to refresh some memories as well!)
- act as a type of 'shrill alarm' where community members can report crime happening on the Stellar Network; I will be adding community members to a Task Force group which will have privilege to go on our website and verify scams or not which will then be echo'd across multiple social media bots to spread the warning further
- tackle scams head-on as it is happening
- report the crime to other entities in the community, other watchdogs, and justice enforcement agencies in their respective countries
- and much much more
I could keep writing but realistically I have to keep coding in order to make this project worthy of anything that the community can use.
SCF funding is essential to support the project's future, financially. As it stands, the frontend of this project is not past its prototype stage and I have been working on multiple backend software that will help me challenge and stop scams that appear. It is an experimental phase and I will go into detail with the community in a future blog post with my results.
Whether this project becomes what I want it to be, or someone else makes something better, or other community members group up with me so we can make something even bigger, the end goal is to protect the community and educate them the instant they join. The reason for this is there are scammers who joined crypto-communities and they are specifically targeting new one as they join.
This is not only a crime, it's disgusting and has no use in our space. I want to stop this for good. These are sophisticated scams that have been built by someone who has been in the space for over 4 years. Whether our portal educates newcomers and the community more than other portals, the point is this crime will not stop and the only true way to prevent this is to educate the community, continuously, and on new tactics criminals are using. Which is why I am trying to commit more time on educational content and hoping this will be finished before nominations phase, in which case I can continue on other backend material (bots).
For over 2 months I have been implementing certain bots but have already come across hardware constraints. Aside from my hardware constraints, the ability to fully commit to being a watchguard for the Stellar Network requires man power. Even the SDF members who spend their time to protect the community have to spend their own time in their day that could otherwise be spent in other ways. As a moderator for over 2 years in multiple community channels, I have to say it would be quite worth to have a fully-automated security watchbot overlooking the entire Stellar Network and its community, that's also available for any community member to use. I would even go as far as that our project won't be the only one (we hope), and others in different industries and fields will join together to make a bigger security apparatus for the Stellar Network, and the extended traditional financial system. There are very talented developers in this space and so all we need is a good collab team to get things rolling. I hope to create discussion groups soon so people can brainstorm security guidelines, not just for themselves and their services but for the entirety of the community.
Setting up a donation box will be on our to-do list but as it stands we are hoping for a size-able investment from the community to guarantee our operations for the future. I have estimated that an SCF funding of 100,000 XLM would secure our operations for the next 14 months. Anything more will be escrowed for future operations and/or to hire talent.
This project is in for the long haul, so whether we win this SCF or not, we will still be doing what we are doing. SCF funding will just help us reach our goals quicker and guarantee our operations for over a full year. I hope to unveil more content and features to the website that will show our worth.
Thank you for reading.
