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ICERaid: Pokemon GO for Bounty Hunters? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-27

If this hadn’t been on TPM, I’d have thought it was the Onion, but this is real; the image above is their front page — and the app basically is “inform and get crypto”. It’s shady on so many levels it’s hard to cover them all, but TPM has a good explanation of it (bolding mine) :

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/iceraid-the-app-that-asks-you-to-report-illegal-immigrants-for-crypto ICERaid: The App That Asks You To Report Illegal Immigrants For Crypto Proud Boys and a man banned from the financial services industry both promote a bizarre and murky effort to make nativism lucrative. ... the idea behind it is either ingeniously simple in its pitch for civic engagement or nauseating in its wicked opportunism, depending on your bent: the app offers users tokens of the $RAID digital currency in exchange for taking pictures of undocumented immigrants and submitting them to the app. ICERaid claims that it will then provide the photos to law enforcement, supposedly incentivizing users to contribute to the MAGA project of rooting out undocumented immigrants while watching the coins they receive spike in value. ...What makes ICERaid different is that it combines the desire to see the value number go up that’s core to the appeal of so many crypto projects with Stalin-style denunciations. In this case, the pitch is that reporting an undocumented immigrant could earn you cash. It’s the speculative rush around crypto combined with the fundamental authoritarian impulse: bringing your neighbors into line and getting the state to act against them. The more people that ICERaid users report, the more cryptocurrency they receive in return, should the app validate the targets. There’s a fixed number of coins that the company has issued; as reports come in to ICERaid and are validated, demand increases, in theoretically raising the price. In the world of ICERaid, this is all part of a vision called “GovFi”: instead of the state providing a service, like law enforcement, it will devolve to citizens incentivized to participate through crypto. Think quasi-organized vigilantism, on the blockchain. Earlier this month, Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader, said that he had signed on as “czar” for the project.

This is a long article that goes into detail about how impossible it is to even determine WHO started or owns the company, and it’s worth reading it all. Meanwhile, on the front page of this monstrosity, they explain their pitch:

But the part that made me gag and see red was this bit:

Given the brazen kidnapping of honest, hardworking undocumented immigrants at the moment, this statement is Trumpian in its hypocritical BS.

A website called National File, clearly of the rightwing persuasion, has naught but praise:

nationalfile.com/… New App Lets Citizens Send Real-Time Leads on Illegal Aliens It will give Law Enforcement some breathing room. In a time when law enforcement resources are stretched thin, a new blockchain-based app is offering a disruptive solution to the age-old problem of intelligence gathering. ...Built on the blockchain, the ICERAID app allows users to upload images, video, and location-tagged reports of illegal immigrant activity or criminal behavior. In return, users earn ICERAID crypto tokens, which will soon launch on the Solana network.

And, oh! It’s been touted by Matt Gaetz! There’s some fishy bonafides!

Fortunately, it seems that this isn’t really up and running quite yet. They are now in “validation testing” mode. But it’s unclear to me whether they are already accepting snitches and sneak photos.

In any case, I thought this needed a heads up and a close watch… cell phone cameras might be the next war’s basic weapon.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/27/2330385/-ICERaid-Pokemon-GO-for-Bounty-Hunters?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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