Hey there,

I saw this Reddit comment recently. Regardless of tipping etiquette (don't tip small amounts outside of crypto subs, if at all) it actually said the tip amount in USD which was an interesting thing for a comment to do. Someone pointed out that the amount was wrong, however - they were claiming ~$0.07 of RDD to be worth over $1.

At first I thought it was a harmless mistake, but upon clicking the "What's this?" link you are presented with this website.

So it's actually actively trying to scam users out of money. They're selling cryptocurrency at a ridiculous 4300% markup ($14.99 for $0.35 worth of RDD) and it's a really, really insidious thing.

Check out this page for how they actively manipulate users: http://reddmeup.blogspot.com/p/why-buy-reddcoin.html

Reddcoin and the wider cryptocurrency community need to practice due diligence when they see tips that include links. It's extremely suspicious for a user to add a "What's this?" when all of the bots do that themselves when replying to and confirming tips.

Additionally, these scammers are either not actually tipping the amount (their account is empty) or are posting a comment and then editing it to avoid getting caught by the bot operators.

Anyways, how can you help?

• Please give suggestions for how bot operators can detect and deal with this.
• If you are a bot operator, it's time to publicly shame users that fake tips or tip money they don't have. Please gently start doing so if you're willing. (paging /u/dogetipbot and /u/mohland)
• If you are a user and you see a post like this, report it - and report it to the mods of that subreddit as spam, giving a detailed explanation and possibly a link to this post. Alternatively, click "other" when reporting and link to this post.

A lot of subreddits have either banned tipbots or consider them spam - this kind of scam can only make that trend significantly worse if we don't band together in finding ways to deal with this.

~ pseudo