IOST Community Hub Announcement

Dear IOST Community,

We were very impressed with the enthusiastic response to our Community Hub Referral Program. More than 500,000 users from over 150 countries signed up for the Community Hub — we couldn’t have hoped for more amazing results!

While the IOST Community Hub Referral Program has been a roaring success, we have detected an an extremely abnormal amount of traffic — largely caused by hackers attempting to spam the network. This traffic caused tremendous pressure on the server and upon inspection of our database, it became clear that a small number of malicious users accumulated a large portion of the referrals in a short period of time. The high volume of malicious traffic also affected our real users and many of the technical difficulties we’ve been working through over the last 4 days.

Due to the extremely high volume of fake traffic and in order to ensure that these hackers are not able to claim the prizes meant for our community, we have decided to close the referral program slightly earlier, at 10am on July 28th (GMT+8). By closing the referral program at this time, we will be able to sort through the results to remove cheaters and ensure that our incredible community receives their rewards as quickly as possible!

We will be publicizing the results of the event in the next 7 days, and will also publish an explanation of our methodology for identifying malicious users. We will then distribute rewards to all users who abided by the contest rules!

Help Us Remove Cheaters from our Community

So far, thanks to reports from community members, we have found a total of 339 suspicious accounts that were responsible for more than 100,000 fake referrals.

In order to ensure the Referral Program rewards the incredible work done by the IOST community, we have decided to take measures to correct this.

The following 15 accounts have been permanently banned.

We will continue to deal with each case seriously. IOST condemns any cheating that attempts to undermine the justice of the community.

You can help report any accounts you believe may have cheated or, if you are worried that your legitimate account has been compromised, please submit the account info to the link below:

Account reporting form

Within the first 12 hours following this announcement, users who submit a self-inspection will retain any referral bonus they earned from real users. If not they will be processed under the results of our investigation.

All IOST tokens that are recovered for cheating in the event will be put into the Community Hub for community building.

The final interpretation of this activity belongs to the IOST Foundation. If you have any questions, please contact: support@iost.io Due to the large number of work orders, we will reply within 3 working days.

Sincerely,
IOST Community Hub Team