frens, if you've been reading my posts... You know I cover a lot of crypto and NFT scams. I've seen it all. Or so I thought. This one is crazy.
WorldCoin - Universal Basic Income?
The WorldCoin team set out with a supposed goal of providing universal basic income to the world via cryptocurrency. It's pretty simple and straightforward. You stare at the magical silver orb and receive free cryptocurrency. Yeah, you read that right. You have to stare into a silver orb to receive your "free" cryptocurrency.
Sounds a little odd, right? Well it only gets even more weird as we dive into this thing. In order to distribute this UBI cryptocurrency, they needed a way to verify that the people eligible were actually human. I guess a CAPTCHA or the other traditional ways of verifying someone isn't a robot wasn't good enough. Wrong, they just needed a gimmick to do what their actual goal was...
Thus, the Orb is created. This is a silver orb that looks like a crystal ball, which people must stare into in order to be eligible for WorldCoin. What happens when the user stares into the orb is a few really scary things. First off - their irises are scanned. The device also uses a thermal scanner to check the body temperature of the subject looking into it. Lastly, it uses 3D cameras to map the face, body, and eyes of the subject.
If you don't see the major issues here, just go ahead and click off this post and keep scrolling. This device isn't just verifying if the subject is human, it's uploading insane amounts of information to WorldCoin's servers. They're data mining in the real world by offering people money to sign up. Who knows what they do with all this data? Well, I have my guesses and number 1 would be selling it.
The really fucked up thing about this is that they're taking advantage of people in 3rd world or under-developed countries. Offering money to these people in exchange for a few seconds of looking at a weird silver orb? Hell yeah, the people can barely afford to eat so of course they're gunna do it. They were offered $20 worth of WorldCoin, which only had theoretical value.
This is where the whole things gets even more weird. It operated as a fucking pyramid scheme. The job was simple - become and "Orb Operator" and recruit as many people as possible to become "Orb Operators". They also had to get as many sign-ups as possible by having victims scan their faces. If these operators couldn't maintain their weekly target of 500 sign ups, they were forced to return their orbs. That seems insanely high!
After multiple run-ins with authorities in Africa and multiple operators being arrested, things were falling apart. The ones that could managed to get 700+ sign ups per week could get an additional orb for a sub-operator. All they had to do was tell people they would get "free money for signing up". Simple, right?
Operators were paid $3 per sign up and $6 per sign up over their target. You can see how appealing this would be in a country where that's a full day's salary or more. There were many complaints of delayed payments to operators as well which mad ethe whole thing look even more sketchy. These people were quitting their jobs to do this bullshit.
A few months in, they completely changed the payment structure from $3 per sign up to 2.5 WLD (WorldCoin). This was every week for 10 weeks, and who knows what it was even worth. I can't seem to find any price data so probably worthless. If they managed to do this for 10 weeks 3 times in a row, they could get $5.30 in USDT. If not, they would only be paid 60 cents. What the actual fuck lol.
There's just so many layers to this bullshit project that it's disgusting. They claim that they will eventually "delete" the data that they are harvesting from users. Who knows if that's true or if it will ever happen. They don't care, they have over half a million people's data to sell so they're probably really happy. They even claim they are going to become a "non-profit" lol.
Facing numerous problems and hundreds of complaints, they even commented saying that they do not promise to even deliver the WorldCoin cryptocurrency. They claim that this was just an experiment and that operators were just product testers. They've collected enough data to sell and make shit tons of money. Why deliver anything? Despite all this bullshit and blatantly scamming people, they continue to make money and raise venture capital. Surprise surprise.
Exploit the poor, become more rich. Capitalism at its finest I guess.
Check out these articles on BuzzFeed and Technology Review if you wanna get more insight into this madness.
Thanks for reading! Much love.
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