A couple of months ago, Upbit—one of South Korea’s largest exchanges—set up a bounty system whereby people reporting fraudulent ICOs would be rewarded for their diligence.
The company just recently followed up on this and posted an update in its blog, revealing that six people had been awarded under its system with 1 million won (around $930).
“Since the implementation of the system, a total of 10 cases have been received and 6 of them have been selected. On June 6, we sent a reward of KRW 1 million with appreciation to the participants… Although we have not fulfilled 100% of the procedures of the first announcement (due to lack of evidence from investigative reports), we gave the award in recognition of their interest and participation in the Upbit program to create a sound cryptocurrency ecosystem,” the company wrote.
Upbit uses this data to cooperate with the authorities in apprehending and prosecuting the individuals that run these frauds. It’s a “first come, first serve” system where only the first person to successfully provide evidence of a wrongdoing by an ICO gets the reward.
Prior to setting up the bounty, Upbit had already reported on 20 other scams involving ICOs using multi-level marketing tactics to promote their coins and other types of illegal activities.
Considering the amount of scrutiny that exchanges are under in South Korea, this was perhaps a good PR move that demonstrated that the cryptocurrency market in the country doesn’t have to be at odds with the government. For all its effort, a month ago, Upbit was raided by authorities in the country, sparking a bear market for Bitcoin.
More recently, the investigation concluded that none of the two largest exchanges in South Korea—which includes Bithumb, Upbit’s largest rival—have any evidence of any wrongdoing.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
