Is there such a thing as too much anti-fraud? Apparently there is!

Many of you would have realised that something strange happened on Tratok’s new smart contract over the last few days. The matter took a long time to investigate and get to the bottom of as since it was a Friday (a non-office day in the UAE). In short, our anti-fraud measures were too strong. So what happened? Let us break it down for you. As many of you know from our previous updates, we have automated filters built into Tratok to protect the community. Instead of opening on 2nd September as agreed, the good team at Hotbit were uber-efficient and opened as soon as they completed the swap. (We cannot blame them for being faster at their jobs than expected, and it is a credit to them, that they worked so quickly to give their users what they wanted.).

What happened next, is something that many predicted. Naturally all the “true believers” from the airdrop started dumping instantly and this raised a flag with our systems that then interacted with the smart contract started locking all the accounts due to the surge in volume being sent to a single address that was not cleared on the system. This is a measure designed to protect people in what was interpreted as a hack attempt. We apologize for this and the team is working to remedy this as soon as possible. To make it up to the community, we will compensate all of those affected for the inconvenience. We believe in maximum transparency and hope the community understands that this measure was done to protect them. Honesty and transparency is the best approach and we will always continue to provide only the truth to true supporters. In short, we are sorry that this unforeseen event happened. We find it heartening that those who stand by Tratok and actually believe in the project have supported this measure and appreciate it why this happened, while those who simply pretended to support for free money ranted, raved and even went out of their way to hurt the project.

Every cloud has a silver lining:

Despite the carnage that occurred, the good news is that the price is recovering following 48% of the airdrop tokens being dumped on day one. We have seen this behaviour follow each and every airdrop and usually what follows is members of the public getting in on a good buying opportunity. We expect further stability to ensue in the weeks ahead.

In addition, following this final airdrop, we can rid the community of the undesirable elements and focus more energy on product development and less energy on fighting further fraud and spoon-feeding answers to individuals who quite simply refuse to take the time to do their own research.

That is not all though. The lockdown gave us an opportunity to see the decoded input of all the reverted transactions. The decoded input data is a blessing as it allowed us to eliminate extensive fraud and lock wallets which were clearly fraudulent in nature. Each transaction was looked at and wallets which tried to transfer to a common deposit address, or external wallet were frozen and will remain frozen. Let us be frank here, it is not unreasonable for a family or couple to share a common wallet or exchange account. However, when you see 10+ “individuals ” doing so, it clearly is a case of fraud. You can argue innocence or claim someone stole your private keys and did this without you knowing as much as you like, we will not be fooled. We have heard all of these “creative excuses before”. At Monday’s meeting, a senior member of the team even joked that we should give a reward for the most creative or outlandish excuse.

Some key facts that everyone needs to read:

Guilty parties who knowingly sold their old tokens after getting their swap to innocent members of the public will NOT have their accounts unlocked. They knowingly committed an evil deed and as such will now be shown the same compassion that they showed others. Their tokens will be confiscated by the custodian and kept to give to the innocents that they cheated. If you are one such victim, please get in touch.

If the swap to the new token has not yet been completed, please send your old TRATOK tokens to the following address: 0x7122be850a76C95Dd3ef4a8d446A5f6730A63835. Give the team 24 hours to verify the source of your tokens, to ensure people aren’t trying to be clever and obtain double swaps. Those that do, will be caught and everything will be confiscated. Following this swap, tokens (if received only from the first airdrops in late 2018 and March 2019) will be locked for a 50-day period to ensure that no fraud is taking place. In case you have not realised, we are very against such behaviour. P.S. Attempting to transfer tokens to make them appear purchased privately or by a DEX is a trick that we are aware many will try. Trying to fool the system this way will result in immediate disqualification.

So far 5.3 million tokens have been confiscated by the custodian and put into the following wallet:https://etherscan.io/token/0xe225aca29524bb65fd82c79a9602f3b4f9c6fe3f?a=0x699c318682de0a7718fb15c04f756b0ae5da46b3. These tokens will be added to those confiscated by frauds during the airdrop and given to the honest members of the community, charity events and further competitions. Note accounts that instant dumped are, for obvious reasons, disqualified from this loyalty reward.

A certain group has set up a fake chat on telegram called tratokchat where they are attempting to steal funds from the public. Do not fall for this. We suspect it to be the same group that has been spamming Hotbit and social media with slanders over the last few days, an act that actually resulted in people researching Tratok and buying in the exchanges. To name one such example, we received an email from a lawyer who claimed he researched Tratok this week after seeing the fake spam complaints that we “didn’t pay employee salaries” and that “we stole school funds from investors”. He was so impressed by our attitude against fraud and the private funded existing product that Tratok has, that he wanted to directly buy tokens from Tratok Ltd. Naturally, we directed him to the exchanges.

Too many people are messaging the volunteers in our official Telegram channels for support. This is not effective to receive proper support as messages get lost in the midst of the chat and there is no clear log to track and resolve things. It also creates duplicate work for the user as they often have to go and contact support as a result. Therefore we have launched a one-stop support solution to assist users with support. This may be found at https://tratok.support. From now on, the chat will be used for announcements, suggestions and discussion. For support to be effective, please use this correct channel.

What happens next?

We are working closely with Mercatox to organise their opening of the new Tratok contract this week. Following that, we will ask TokenStore for assistance. Once this is completed we will be announcing a new Top 5 (legitimate volume) exchange partnership, which we believe will be another step in the public mass adoption of Tratok.

More anti-fraud and anti-leech routines will be launched in the next 48 hours. We will cleanse the community of those who are unwilling to read, support and who just want a handout. As quite frankly too much time and resources have been spent on those who quite frankly have outstayed their welcome.

To begin the unlocking of wallets, please visit https://tratok.support and create a ticket with your information. The custodian can then view your account perform the needful actions. Please rest assured that justice will be done. Every honest supporter and member of this community is valued and respected and we apologize that it has come to this, however, due to the poor behaviour and lack of integrity of many of those who receive airdrops, each request will be individually handled. It has become apparent that personal attention to detail is required in each case to look after those who were honest and protect the community from those who do not have good intentions.

Our charity portal has been launched at https://tratok.org. Should you know a worthy cause, please feel free to get in touch with Nick via the details provided there. 2.5% of all Tratok is dedicated to such causes and we intend to fulfil our duty of being good corporate citizens.

In the next month, we are launching almost 5000 five-star hotel rooms in the Emirate of Dubai and are launching the activities gateway which will include activities such as golf, safaris and sports.

Finally, we wish to thank the true community for their support. The fraudsters tried to hurt this project with theft, lies, slander, spam and impersonation. This is the last thing that anyone with a legitimate interest would try to do, as it would only hurt them. With the support of all of you, not only did their attempt fail, but it actually turned into a decent promotion for Tratok. The community managers have given us a list of those who rallied to support and do the right thing. We know who you are, and we wish to publicly say thank you. You are the ones who have helped Tratok grow over the last year and this project also belongs to you.