Fund 10 winner email addresses targeted for SPAM

Governance Project Catalyst
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What kind of support from the Catalyst team and/or community pressure is needed to stop ignorant people at aggressive companies from using the Catalyst project winners’ personal email addresses for unsolicited email advertising of Cardano services? So far I’ve had:

Nikita Ngan Nguyen - Chief Business Officer | Ekoios Technology

Subject: Rphair, Congrats on being selected for Project Catalyst Fund10
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2023 14:21:45 +0000
From: Nikita Nguyen nikita@ekoios.net

Kevin Cislak - Co-founder - dyvin consulting

Subject: Maximize Your Catalyst Funds: Let’s Dive In!
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2023 15:02:05 -0700
From: Kevin From Dyv in Consulting dyvinconsulting@gmail.com

ProSkills39 Team - proskills39 . com

Subject: Support F10 Proposers to hire the right Freelancers/Talents_ProSkills39 Team
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2023 17:31:49 +0700
From: ProSkills39 proskills3939@gmail.com
CC: alyssanguyenle.work@gmail.com

I can confirm all three so far are mass mailings rather than personal contacts, because 1) I’ve known none of these before and 2) they’re all pushing outsourcing services, while my funded proposal is specifically for the work of a single person (me) and anyone who had read the headline sections would see that immediately.

I copied the Catalyst Team email address on #2 of these messages, explaining why it’s a violation to be treated this way, with no response that I am aware of:

Subject: [SPAM problem to funded proposers} Fwd: Maximize Your Catalyst Funds: Let’s Dive In!
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2023 21:18:01 -0400
From: Robert Phair rphair@cosd.com
To: Kevin From Dyv in Consulting dyvinconsulting@gmail.com
CC: catalyst catalyst@iohk.io

hey Kevin (cc: Catalyst team) … What on earth would make you think successful Catalyst proposers would be more open to getting Spam than anyone else?

I assure you I’ve read your business proposition more than you’ve read mine… my own proposal is for technical writing & standards, with absolutely no need or budget for project management or recruitment. Therefore you have likely made the same assumptions about all other projects that you’ve mass-emailed. I find it curious that there is not an assumed code of ethics which would prevent this abuse of people’s contact information.

I’m about 2 more such messages away from re-posting a digest of these messages to the Cardano Forum to illustrate this problem of UCE/Spam to Fund 10 Catalyst successful proposers. Of course you would be a cited example so I do hope it won’t come to that, but also hope you might help discourage any other associates from treating Cardano community members so cheaply and disrespectfully.

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Thats an absolutly no-go! Hopefully you get a feedback from the Catalyst team.

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Dear team,

It is admin of ProSkills39 team, we are sorry for the inconvenience may occur to you
Let us clarify the intention

1/ We want to offer the support of resource platform to the F10 Funded Proposers to help you deliver project with right resources (as we found out the completed rate of past funded proposals are very low 50-60%)

2/ We chose approach by reply to Each of email of funded proposers in the database public in IdeaScale with the Metadata Email. We even do not use Mailchimp or similar Email marketing service.

3/ Last but not least, our truly apology for the case that we did not go through details of your funded proposal for the single person delivery @COSDpool (with sincere apology)

We also received some positive reactions from the community of F10.

All in all, ProSkills39 team we take this as learning lessons and hope to serve the Catalyst community

Sincerely yours,
ProSkills39 team

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All in all, despite all the above intentions, we are sincerely sorry and the approach that cause you the inconveniences/troubles.

ProSkills39 team we take this as learning lessons and hope to serve the Catalyst community better.

Our sincere apology to all F10 funded proposers,
ProSkills39 team :pray:

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Another spam shot to Catalyst Fund 10 project email addresses, today from this company:

Allison Fromm - Chief Commercial Officer - proofspace . id

Subject: Building Decentralized Identity on Cardano
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 01:49:23 -0700
From: Allison Fromm allison@proofspace.id

As with all the other spam cases above, I can confirm this representative is using F10 winners as a targeted mailing list… the business premise of “decentralised ID” isn’t appropriate to our own documentation & standards project, which demonstrates they haven’t read any of the Catalyst proposals. Fund 10 is simply a targeted email database as far as they are concerned.

@danny_cryptofay since this exposure of project email addresses has been unique to Fund 10 so far, does the Catalyst team plan to do anything at all about the new problem that has been created?

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I also got a lot of spam, there was one time when some spammer figured out that by sending email to particular address ALL Catalyst member got that spam… it was years ago so it wasn’t a big issue, there were less participants

and here the first sender judging by the name is russian