According to reports on the social network Reddit, which were published on March 20, 2019, a scammer appeared on the Augur platform, cheating other users of the platform at the stakes, creating deliberately invalid events.
Augur, a forecasting platform created by the non-profit foundation Forecast Foundation, which was launched in July 2018 based on the Ethereum blockchain (ETH). Augur users can set REP tokens on the outcome of various events.
The fraud, which became known, is to create predictions that have subtle contradictions or inconsistencies in its conditions, which ultimately will lead to the fact that the event will be invalid, and all invested funds will be evenly distributed among the players.
In addition, the fraudster bets the outcome of the event, which is unlikely to win, thus he guarantees himself a guaranteed payment in the redistribution of invested funds.
In the discussion thread on Reddit an example of one “distorted” event was published, which was named “Ethereum Price at the end of March 2019?”. While in the title and additional details it is stated that the event is valid on March 31, 2019 UTC 0, but there is a discrepancy with the actual specified expiration date of 1:59 pm UTC on March 31 - a few hours earlier. This minor inconsistency effectively guarantees that the event will be flagged as invalid.
