WOM FAQ #3: How Is WOM Helping To Protect The Community?

[Shariar Porosh]

We have designed our platforms to be safe and enjoyable environments for our creator and authenticator community and we can all play our role in contributing towards this.

We therefore have to sometimes take decisions, such as banning accounts, which are not easy nor light to make, but necessary in order to protect the Ecosystem.

Why Do We Need To Protect The Community?

Given the nature of the YEAY and WOM platforms we are at an increased risk of attack when compared with “normal” social networks. This means we need to be more vigilant and strict about protecting the Ecosystem.

Instagram isn’t really hurt if people sign up under multiple accounts and in some ways even benefits. There are some downsides which is why Twitter has policies about cross-posting and reciprocal engagement. But in all cases, a certain subsection of people are hurt and the vast majority of users aren’t affected or aware of a problem.

In the case of WOM, however, one bad actor literally impacts every single person and organization in the Ecosystem. One false like or comment on someone’s recommendation takes WOM rewards from you. So we must strictly enforce one account per person and swiftly stop any inflationary actions that skews the rewards to undeserving people.

How Do We Protect The Community?

One of the most important ways that we protect the community is by identifying and eliminating fraudulent activity. The fraudulent activity we see on the platforms can take several different forms across a number of different tactics. We are confident in our decisions and we have always reserved the right to remove fraudulent users from the system.

We will therefore not go into details regarding the fraudulent activities as this may hint at methods to bypass our detection.

That said, our Terms & Conditions state that we may take actions we deem reasonably necessary to prevent fraud and abuse. These were recently updated to clarify some examples of fraud and abuse and common reasons for an account ban on the WOM and partner app, YEAY, platforms may include:

    Creating more than one App account and more than one WOM Token account per App.
    Influencing, inflating, or otherwise manipulating any content in the Services or partner Services (e.g. YEAY GmbH and its YEAY app) or colluding or otherwise working together with other parties to do the same.
    Any action regarding conversion of fiat currencies to WOM, or WOM to fiat currencies that are subject to mandatory reporting for Money laundering and funding of terrorism, such a multiple accounts transfering WOM to a single external address, or a single external address transferring WOM to multiple internal accounts.

Given the level and severity of certain fraudulent activities, it takes time for us to fully remove these accounts from the system. As a result, content from banned users may continue to appear in the apps for a short period after they are banned.

A Few Words From WOM

Here are a few words from our Head of Product, Chris Hardaker:

    “I would like to thank my team, the YEAY and WOM communities, and those community members who helped us to improve our fraud detection processes and systems. We are now in a better position to protect our creators and, as the community goes from strength to strength, I believe that those who truly embrace the power of Word of Mouth marketing in an honest, engaging and positive manner will reap greater and greater rewards.”

You can read the full Terms & Conditions of using our platforms here

If you have any further questions please contact our help desk

*Read the legal disclaimer: https://womprotocol.io/disclaimer/