Everyone knows, since the begining of Crypto and the world of internet that Scams exist. It really is Red Queen dilemma but I’m for prevention and believe in its favor.
So the idea behind SAFE HELP Desk is to take precautions against scammers right now to reduce the number of people plundered in the future.
How do scammers work?
Making a fake profile. They copy an admin photo. They change one or two letters from the admin’s name. And they impersonate for him.
Then they are waiting for new members of the community and trying to deceive them.
We can create a driven by the community SAFE HELP Desk to help everyone and declare that only legitimate help can be found there.
This message can be added to any official message from MaidSafe and to all pinned message in the forum (and other communication channels like sites, telegram, medium and so on)
Proof of the concept
We know that not everyone will register in the forum to get help. So we need different channels of help leading to the SAFE HELP Desk.
For example a SAFE HELP phone line
00441292700696 UK Ayr 0012027135981 US Washington
What will you hear when you call?
“Never send money to anyone. All services of SAFE HELP Desk are free!”
And then you can speak to a volunteer from the community (in this proof of concept I will pick up the phone, please excuse me for my spoken English )
it shouldnt be a phone line, it should be a website or a sub-forum in this forum where anyone can make a post but only admins and moderators can answer
For a network that doesn’t have the capacity to reset passwords - the few calls, I hope, about recovering accounts would be very painful.
Do need to drum in to users that the network is so secure, only the user will have the power to access the account. … But I have dealt with users - they will bitch, moan and beat you down with weird assumptions.
No the users will be noobs with respect to those. Just a simple web page with a submission form and/or “live chat” box that any browser can display. No signing up to other chat services or IRC
A premium line may make enough to cover its costs, And sometimes folk just want to talk to a human. Even if that human is only telling them in simple terms what they can read on a support forum/page.
Never underestimate the value of a human voice when someone is “lost”.
Even though I bet 90% of calls would be answered with " Look I’m really sorry but if you have lost your password, there is nothing we can do"
“Now you did write it down, didn’t you? Where were you when you wrote it down? …”
I have had to deal with many poor sods who have lost their 12-word passphrases for other crypto projects. In most cases, its gone but there are a few that can be helped and they are truly grateful. Its very satisfying when you can help and make a difference to someones day,
yes, I did it right away but the problem is what we do when there are 1000 people who follow the facebook page of SAFE Network and all of them get this message? And if they are 10k, 100k, 1 million? What percentage of them will be scamed?
How many people will we let to be deceived before we take action (let’s start putting warnings in each message now)?
I am not sure of the economics of having this be purely volunteer driven. I do see your point that it is satisfying to help people avoid being scammed. But really how many of those calls can one take before it becomes tedious and boring to say the same thing over and over. I mean at some point the discomfort of doing the job may outweigh the satisfaction of helping for a lot of people.
Customer support phone answering people don’t make tons of money but they do expect something in return, so the question is how could we fund at least paying minimum wage(yes I know that varies depending on where you live but lets just say a minimal wage then.) I would contend it really benefits the whole community to have less people being scammed, so it does not seem totally illogical some small percentage of farming rewards could be directed to this cause. Another option would have it be donation driven. If you are a big whale then maybe its worth a small fraction of your holdings to do things that help adoption, like fighting scammers. A 3rd option is it is a pay per use service, but if they are calling cause they just LOST all their safecoin, they might not want to throw around any more money.
I think this would be a great service to have available, but I also think it would totally be work. Maybe there are some other ideas out there on how they could receive compensation for their work. Maybe there are other ways to reward volunteers besides money even. In my experience of volunteering it never became unbearable if there were hot girls there to. Animal shelter is rly good for this FYI. Not sure that plan fits in here, but just want to point out the reward does not have to be money.
