Open letter to Coinpot regarding non-payment issues

Here follows my open letter to Coinpot regarding non-payment issues. I censored a few things, such as my protonmail account name and my IP address, and the formatting probably appears a little different on blogspot than it does on Gmail. I publish this in the hopes that it will be helpful to others.

I previously sent Coinpot support 4 e-mails before this one. However, two were duplicates since I tried to contact them from both my Protonmail account and my Gmail account, so only two unique e-mails before this. I also tried contacting the support for Bonus BitCoin, Bit Fun, and Moon Bitcoin to see if they'd be willing to intervene on my behalf.

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Subject: I followed the terms of service. I never used a bot and I never had more than one account.

Dear Coinpot staff,

I followed your terms of service. I never used a bot or other form of automation. I never had more than one account. I kept my password secure.

This (see screenshot below) is my account. As you can see from the screenshot below, it is an old account. I have been with you guys since November 2019. I am e-mailing you from my Gmail account, even though I registered under my protonmail account, [censored]@protonmail.com, because someone warned me that e-mails from protonmail accounts are often falsely flagged as spam, and I would like for you to see this message.

Since late 2019, I have viewed many many ads and solved many many captchas. I also did a number of Offer Toro offers back when Moon Bitcoin offered an offer bonus on faucet claims based on the number of offers completed within the past 30 days. I have written a blog which used to recommend Coinpot and your affiliate faucets and paid for advertising of my blog, which drove traffic to your sites. I would like to be paid for the work that I did, but unfortunately, my transactions have been cancelled with a note that my account is suspended.

I have been trying to understand your perspective, which is difficult because you never respond to emails, and I see on your notice that you are shutting down, you have written,"During the last few years we have built an incrediby complex and successful fraud engine that analyses users claiming patterns and looks for fraud/bot usage. This grows constantly with new techniques to fight the bad guys! We are extremely proud of how this fraud fighting works - and it is this part of the CoinPot system that will live on in the future..."

But this is not true. There are numerous instances of you refusing to pay legitimate users. People have noted this on Reddit, on blogs, and on forums like BeerMoneyForum.

One user specifically noted that when he was a legitimate user, he got banned. When he botted, the bot was not banned.

Given that your system is banning numerous legitimate users (as attested by the many complaints across many platforms) and yet fails to detect an actual bot that is being used 24/7, your fraud detection system is apparently broken beyond repair.

For example, this user deposited currency in order to earn interest in the VIP rewards system. There is literally zero chance he was a bot. Bots do not deposit. But you still suspended his account and refused to pay him.

I have read about how bot detection systems work in an effort to better understand your view. Apparently, the Google one, even with all of Google's financial backing to develop it, still has problems. It generates a score, a probability that a user is a bot, 0 being they are almost certainly a bot and 1 being they are almost certainly a real person. But even Google's system is hugely flawed. A well-programmed bot can apparently get a score of .9 (almost certainly a person), and a real person can apparently get a low score. In other words, this probability score needs to be taken with about a mountain worth of salt. This is what captchas are supposed to be for. A captcha is a way of checking whether this flawed bot detection system is correct or not, so real users don't get banned for being bots even though they aren't bots. Passing the catpcha is the user's chance to prove that the bot detection system is flawed and they really are a human.

6 of your 7 affiliated faucets even say that the point of passing the captcha is to prove you are human. I have screenshotted this so you can see.

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Now, it is true that very advanced bots can solve captchas. But the vast majority of your users do not have the capability to program such a bot, nor any idea where to download one that isn't infested with malware, plus people also have morals. And frankly, if a few well-programmed bots are able to solve captchas, that isn't the fault of legitimate users. The Moon Faucets say, when they ask you to solve a captcha, "Please prove that you are human!" The BitFun faucet says, when it asks you to solve a captcha, "Human verification". People are going through the work of solving captchas in order to provide you with assurance that they aren't bots. If you suspect that they are a highly advanced bot with captcha-solving capability, then the responsibility is on you to offer them a harder captcha, like an hCaptcha.

You can check my research here:

Google's reCAPTCHA test has been tricked by artificial intelligence | WIRED UK

And here:

reCaptcha v2 vs v3: are they efficient for bot protection?| DataDome

Please do right by your legitimate users, acknowledge that your bot detection system is flawed, and uncancel our transactions, unsuspend our accounts, and pay us what we earned. If this is impossible because you don't have enough funds, then you need to be honest with us and try to work something out, like paying some percentage of what we earned and the rest in advertising credits on Mellow Ads, or keeping your faucets going for awhile with significantly reduced payouts so you can earn enough from advertising to make up the shortcoming.

All the best,

author of the Crypto Gems blog

Crypto Gems (crypto-gems.blogspot.com)