Blue Checkmark and Scams in the Cryptocurrency Space

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny, Colorado always warm always sunny sometimes, Colorado so today I'd like to talk a little bit about scams in our space and Social networks and how they are facilitating and platforming criminal activity So I've been in the cryptocurrency space for over eight years in a long time ago There were no impersonation scams or bots or other such things and about four or five years back. I we all noticed that The giveaway scam started becoming a prominent thing. So basically what would happen is somebody would impersonate someone Maybe it's Adam back. Maybe it's Elon Musk. Maybe it's Bill Gates.

Maybe it's me maybe it's Vitalik Buterin and that impersonator would then convince people to send a Cryptocurrency to them in exchange for receiving cryptocurrencies back It was almost inconceivable to me that people would actually fall for something like this It just makes no sense But this is a space where airdrops exist and this space where all kinds of marketing gimmicks exist So maybe it's entirely possible that Justin Sun would do a giveaway as a loyalty program or something So it has fooled some people but scammers have become Incredibly sophisticated and pervasive for example this video Likely will have on YouTube people who have an account that look looks like mine Charles Hoskinson my picture and all things Comment a whatsapp number on the bottom of comments on it If you go to Lex Friedman podcast you go to the Sylvia Macaulay podcast and you look at the replies to comments as of yesterday There's a fake Lex Friedman who's actually posting numbers for scams And it's just pervasive. We've witnessed fake Daedalus wallets on the Google Play Store and We've noticed all kinds of failures. For example with the Twitter verification program a fake Elon Musk account Has a check mark. So according to Twitter, they verified that person's identity and is conducting giveaway scams So it's absolutely remarkable to me how far this has gone Both ripple and Steve Wozniak have filed lawsuits against YouTube for facilitating giveaway scams And we as a cryptocurrency company, we have to make some decisions about what are we going to do? How can we help people how can we protect people?

Now one thing that's clear to me is that these social media organizations are both fully aware that these things are happening it's inconceivable they're not because even Twitter itself was hacked and Bill Gates's account Obama's account Joe Biden's account and others were overtaken by hackers who attempted to do a giveaway scam and That was national news. So it's inconceivable that Twitter is not aware that these things exist now At the very least it would make sense for Twitter to recognize as YouTube and other platforms to recognize certain people in the industry who are routinely victimized and Give them some tools to help fight these things because their platforms are being used and they're profiting Indirectly or in some cases directly through ad revenue from these activities, but they choose to do nothing The CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey follows me on Twitter he knows my account is real in legitimate For some reason even though employees within Twitter are attempting to get me a blue checkmark to validate my account There is no path to my account being validated even though employees of Twitter are aware that people on a daily basis create impersonating accounts There is no path for us to have recourse there and in some cases Imposter accounts are not taken down. Even when they're reported by the community because apparently they fall under a parody or some other provision there and I just ask what is the standard if it's simply a matter of me photocopying a passport or physically traveling to the offices in San Francisco Or signing something with my known PGP key or something that belongs to my company iohk I'm happy to do that to this date. No matter who we contact what we do What channel we go through including directly reaching out to the CEO of Twitter? There is no answer other than we're not Providing that program anymore Despite that other people including the other Charles Hoskinson a journalist was less than 7,000 followers Have gotten check marks Why does this matter because millions of dollars of ADA have been stolen through giveaway scams on?

Instagram today right now. There is an account with over 12,000 followers impersonating me I had a person reach out to me and that person had a two-month catfish romance with the operator of that Instagram account Can you imagine how violated a person feels when something like that happens? Do you imagine how? disgusted especially people whose English competency is not very strong how disgusted someone feels once they've been had by a scam and Can you imagine how disgusted we feel as a company when our brand and reputation is being? Misused repeatedly.

This is not just a laughing matter guy When people get scammed they often reach out to us Threaten us with lawsuits. I've had numerous death threats from people over this including people sending pictures of my home of my parents of relatives my animals It's not a laughing matter It's not a joke when people feel that someone has stolen from them or harmed them They get angry and at some point it will turn into violence for someone within our industry This is the very real human consequences of the scams that have occurred and continue to occur facilitated by uncaring social media There are sophisticated AI tools that are used to deplatform and censor speech that these people don't like If you mentioned coronavirus in a video Somehow you'll notice that there's some annotation on that video on YouTube about coronavirus information This is not done by a human being it's done by algorithms So you tell me isn't it possible to apply that same technology and tool when someone mentions the giveaway of a cryptocurrency? to do that and Second why aren't the people who are constantly defrauded and scammed Offered some recourse in special escalation in their platforms because it's a known problem that harms our Industry and our user base It's a complete unknown to me the very fact that it's impossible for the founder of a cryptocurrency That's in the top ten with billions of dollars of economic value to get a simple blue checkmark. That's given to C-list and D-list celebrities and Athletes is extraordinary to me and it's left me wondering maybe the solution for me is to simply leave all social media to begin with and That we can broadcast through our official accounts that every single Charles Hoskinson Facebook page Instagram page Twitter feed YouTube page is simply fake Maybe that's the solution that we're forced to do Self-deplatforming so that the only people who have a platform or scammers and everybody in our community knows I don't know. I'm at a complete wit's end because we're not offered anything from the social media companies It really there's not much we can do in the criminal law sense Because most of these scammers are based abroad in countries.

They can't be reached that said we are curious So I've put out a requisition to hire someone with a law enforcement background either a former FBI agent or former law enforcement agent Specifically to be within my company to worry about scams in our space amongst other concerns of that nature and That person's day job will be to see what we can do to help improve the situation second perhaps litigation both from my company to the social media companies and from our Industry to the social media companies as a class-action lawsuit would be prudent So we're going to conduct an internal investigation and if we can determine that these companies are profiting from scams Through ad revenue directly or indirectly there definitely is a tort there and perhaps after a class-action lawsuit Perhaps after enormous negative press they will take this issue seriously Because I'm very tired of getting emails every single day from victims I'm very tired from getting emails every single day from people who have been misled I'm very tired of being blamed for stealing money from people and I'm very tired of a lack of empathy about this issue It isn't vanity that compels me to ask for simple things a verified account It's the sake that I am a major figure in an ecosystem and the fact that I occupy that role Whomever would occupy that role. I need some form of verification This is the very reason the checkmark program exists for government officials Could you imagine how much disruption would occur if there was a fake Biden account people believed it was true and tweeting things It would be catastrophically damaging That's why we have the verification program So that's where we're at and I wanted to make a video to talk about it And we as a community will do what we can do We'll also work with partners to see if we can build tools to help our community For example, we really admire and love working with Singularity net and I think that AI could potentially help people Get a little bit more credibility and valid validation in that there's been several suggestions about putting disclaimers and warnings into dead list And it may be reasonable at this point if these scams continue Without any resolution to have the default mode be a beginner mode for dead list Which gives prompts to warn people about certain things like giveaway scams and so forth And of course will crowdsource the problem and actively engage with the community for suggestions and advice about how to resolve these things but for my part, I'll do everything in my power as the CEO of my company to try to do what we can to Report these crimes when they come up to law enforcement Even though there's very little recourse oftentimes to explore other avenues including litigation if it it can work But that's a mixed bag ripple and Steve haven't really had a huge amount of success there and of course to Use the pulpit that I have for as long as I have it to broadcast that these things are happening across our entire industry we will also reach out to other cryptocurrency ventures who have been repeatedly victimized as well and See if we can create some sort of common understanding amongst the entire industry So instead of just speaking as Charles Hoskinson from IOG Working with Cardano we can speak as an entire industry to the social media giants in the mid to long term I think this is another one of the many examples of what happens when monopolies form and there's very little Accountability for those monopolies. There are no consumer protections and there's no strong action against the misuse of platforms By the people who operate them when they profit regardless if they resolve it or not And this is why I believe the blockchain industry has a lot to say in the social media side of things we on our side have already started discussing with a broad group of people who are in the social media space and also in the decentralized social media space about how could viable competitors be constructed that can have built-in Authentication and the use of AI for the curation of information to help people get better understandings of veracity Now this is a long arc endeavor, which will take months to years to see fruit so we have to have a multimodal solution where we do some things in the near term in the short term and We do some things in the midterm and longer term and hopefully the economic consequences of ignoring this problem will become so pervasive that the social media giants will be forced to Finally take the very technology they've used a platform speech that they politically disagree with and actually use it for something socially beneficial and Deplatform criminals who are only there through automation to steal from you and to mislead people That's where we're at as an industry. I'm sad to make a video like this It's a disgusting situation and it continues to get worse and it continues to get more innovative as I said before From fake bots commenting on comments, including this video probably going to occur To giveaway scams with reposted videos to impersonators running instagram accounts with impunity and apparently they won't get taken down I've complained myself about it facebook refuses to take it down Even though I am the charles hoskinson But I currently charles hoskinson can't get the fake charles hoskinson account Which is catfishing people and conducting giveaway scams and other such things and economic crimes and it has 12 000 followers It's an extraordinary thing to me And the consequences are a lot of broken people a lot of angry people death threats Lawsuit threats and other things of course Eventually, we resolve them because they'll come to an understanding that we're just as victimized as they are but That's a huge time sync for our people to deal with that and go through that especially people whose english competency Is not so good Because it's very difficult to communicate with them and try to convince them that they've actually been scammed It's sad day for our industry. It's really a bad situation And if we can't get resolution, then maybe I will leave social media and leave it up to the company to Figure that out and then you guys know that anything you see that's charles hoskinson is Is not real i'll probably stay on youtube because I do enjoy the amas and the channel Even though that that content still can be reposted, but I don't know about twitter at the very least it would be nice for the organization to clearly articulate why?

the other charles hoskinson who's Just some guy who's a journalist gets a check mark But I can't get one even though millions of dollars have been stolen in some cases facilitated directly by their platform if you're in the ethereum community the other things and you dislike me you think i'm an egotistical asshole. Fuck you Honestly have some goddamn empathy and sympathy and understanding for people Really do this is not narcissism and arrogance. And do who I am ism? Trust me. There's no vanity here.

This is just simply a matter of Understanding that someone's name and reputation identity and image are being misused to defraud Many cases elderly people or people who don't have strong english competency And you don't care about those people you just call them idiots I certainly believe there's an element of greed But scams can be very pervasive They could be as simple as pretending to be one of our employees And pretending to be in a technical help desk support role and someone's wallet is not working properly And then because they've convinced that person that they're a help desk personnel To give them the wallet recovery phrase suddenly stealing all their ada That's happened on numerous occasions Not just within our ecosystem, but within the ethereum ecosystem the bitcoin ecosystem and many others Okay so when you criticize The mere demand the mere ask for something so simple Do understand that is the consequence of not having these types of things. It certainly doesn't solve the problem But at least it reduces the problem and it shows that these platforms who are aware of the problem Would like to do something to help solve the problem as opposed to being unaware Or not wanting to solve or whatever. It's disgusting And it's so frustrating And I feel helpless I can write any paper we can write any code we can build anything We're planning out order of boris omega We have these amazing ideas for smart contracts and other things and they're coming to market fruition We can run a whole country On our system. That's our goal Yet something as simple as Authenticating a person on one of the world's largest social networks where everyone else gets it is beyond grasp Because a small group of decision makers for whatever reason don't want to do it and there's no accountability there It's disgusting and frustrating it has to stop and we as an industry have to come together Some of its technological some of its legal some of its education and social and as an entire industry I'm confident we can convince the social media giants to take it seriously And they are in a unique position to apply their de-platforming tools to near totally eliminate all giveaway scams I would rather one of my youtube videos Get accidentally taken down because I mentioned giving away ada in this context Then have these 10 000 youtube videos exist because I could always go to youtube and say can you put it back up? It was a an issue with the flagging system But what is not acceptable is for them just to turn a blind eye When they know that millions of dollars have been stolen and a lot of people have been hurt, especially the elderly Who have a lot of trouble navigating this space?

And the consequences are for the rest of their lives. They look at cryptocurrencies as an industry as a scam As a den of vipers and bad people Why would we do that as an industry? Why wouldn't we have empathy for that situation and understanding of it and try to resolve the root causes of it as an industry? So this is as much a call out to those who compete with us As it is for the social media giants You too are suffering from this and let's work together to solve this problem If we can or at the very least to create as much visibility as possible So that the mainstream media takes it seriously and they bully these social media giants into doing the right damn thing Thank you all for listening.