1/ A quick reflection on what happened in the past days/weeks. It started with us mentioning the scam ring responsible for Squiggles. We wanted to release that information, but our account got suspended after one of the people involved paid someone to take our account down.
2/ How does that work? A verified Twitter account changes its handle to “NFT Ethics” and then reports to Twitter that our account impersonated them. Because probably 95% of these cases are legit, Twitter automatically suspends the non-verified account.
3/ We can understand the logic behind it, and also we are fallible to the same “flaw”. When we report something, we might be 95% “right” but there could be collateral damage. You can’t check each & every detail (certainly not with NFTs) and these details can also change over time
4/ A project that started off as a scam, can still become successful (for unexpected reasons) to a degree that the founders (or persons in charge) think it’s worthwhile to continue it. In the same way projects that started with only good intentions can still fail dramatically.
5/ As we already explained before, you need to have a proper justification to dox someone. Twitter does allow it when you use publicly available information and they allow you to mention someone’s name and quite a lot of other information as well – see the exhaustive list below. 
6/ We did not create the PDF document that was released, couldn’t edit the document and didn’t have time to create a proper thread in advance of minting. In the end we decided that sharing the info would outweigh the potential downsides of the document and not releasing it.
7/ We are aware of the sensitivity of doxing someone in the Web3 space, and we recently gave someone a subtle warning. It avoids that you potentially harm someone’s career and project (including their holders), and it serves as an incentive for the person to behave ethically.
8/ An example is the below person. We had a mountain of evidence, but decided to test if a warning would help. Of course he didn’t respond to our “warning”, but we received indications that he changed his behavior and became a bit more careful.
9/ Interestingly after our account was suspended, this person did immediately respond in quite a predictable way. Ultimately you can’t hide your true nature.
10/ We know a lot of the true identities behind all the NFT aliases, but writing threads such as the one about Beanie are very time-consuming. And selecting only one individual to highlight and expose will always be arbitrary, because why that person and not the other one?
11/ Some asked us – why Beanie? We just happened to significantly invest in his project(s). We did not sell any NFT before exposing him, and our wallet transaction(s) confirm that. We are willing to have this verified. We have no affiliation with anyone or any financial incentive
12/ To be fair to Beanie, he actually contributed in many ways to the NFT space. His tweets were intelligent and engaging about interesting projects, and nothing compared to what we currently see with scam rings using the “Follow, Retweet & WL/Giveaway”, incentivized by greed.
13/ We came with a bold warning a week ago for NEW people not to mint any project for 2 weeks. We received a lot of criticism for that, but because of so many tips that we received, our “opinion” was well-informed (in our opinion). Again, it’s always a trade-off.
14/ Many people now start to notice that our statement below was not an exaggeration. It served as a real warning to really do your research and see the characteristics that all these scam projects have in common (in the same way you distinguish spam emails from legit ones).
15/ These projects either have the same (or connected) founders or are based on playbooks that you can purchase in the in the “criminal circuit”. How to earn easy, quick and large amounts of money with NFTs anonymously? This playbook shows you how.
16/ Since people have become more hesitant about projects with non-doxxed founders, these scam rings now often pay “puppets” that pretend that they are the “founders”, so that naive people think that the founders are actually doxed.
17/ That is of course not the case – these founders that earn tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars with all these scam mints want to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. And they have sufficient funds to make that possible.
18/ Quite a few very dubious “social media influencers” are involved. They have the followers, have the PFP that makes them look credible, and are finally able to monetize their following to an extent that they never imagined ever being possible.
19/ Other big NFT influencers have dubious pasts, but have made their millions, and are now part of the “establishment” hoping that nothing will ever come out. New people joining this space won’t have any idea and this information is only known by a very small group of people.
20/ When we deal with (anon) people that we only know via digital interactions, we often fill in the things we don’t know in the most favorable way we imagine. We project our own fantasies to fill in the blanks, which is part of the reason why good people are so often scammed.
21/ Anyone who has ever used online dating (everyone?) will understand this principle. The reality doesn’t often match the imagination, fortunately or unfortunately. But there are always exceptions to the rule, and scammers use these exceptions to convince you of the opposite.
22/ It’s interesting to realize that the Web2 world has instilled so much trust into the digital world, that scammers are abusing that trust and people are simply handing over their hard-earned money without any hesitation.
23/ Digital ethics will likely become one of the foundations and cornerstones of Web3 and the Metaverse and as such cannot be underestimated. We are all individually responsible for the digital world that we together create.
24/ We mentioned earlier that self-regulation is key to move this space further (mainstream). To add an incentive: those that will be able to come up with ethical solutions, will likely be the ones that will financially benefit from this space the most.
https://mobile.twitter.com/NFTethics/status/1483118078791753731
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
