[HN Gopher] TruthWave - A platform for corporate whistleblowers
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TruthWave - A platform for corporate whistleblowers
Author : mannuch
Score : 77 points
Date : 2025-10-30 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.truthwave.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.truthwave.com)
| mind-blight wrote:
| So their team is anonymous. While I understand the desire for
| that, trust is built through transparency. It's really hard to
| convince someone who's job, career, it potentially even life is
| at risk to trust random strangers on the Internet.
|
| It seems like they need people willing to stretch their name to
| create credibility.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Have we forgotten you can authorize witho authenticating? I can
| prove I'm inside the Google office without saying who I am
| dns_snek wrote:
| Does that prove much? I have been inside a Google office
| without ever having worked for Google (visitor).
| dessimus wrote:
| The point is that how does the whistleblower know whether or
| not they are not whistleblowing to the very people or allies
| to those being reported on if who is behind it?
|
| To pull an example out of thin air, would you risk
| whistleblowing to TruthWave on Amazon if you knew that the
| Washington Post was running TruthWave?
| tptacek wrote:
| I would trust the Washington Post with a sensitive tip more
| than I would trust an Internet project.
| exasperaited wrote:
| I think this trust (in the Post) is now misplaced, and in
| the case of the Post and Amazon, you absolutely
| shouldn't. But perhaps it always should have been with
| any single newspaper.
|
| This is why whistleblowers now often work with two
| different organisations with different
| ownership/politics, or in different branches of media, or
| with a journalist backed by the ICIJ (e.g. the Mossack
| Fonseca leak investigation was shared with the ICIJ).
|
| But yes, any generic online whistleblowing broker with
| dozens of concurrent cases is going to be such an obvious
| target for state or organised crime interference. Anyone
| making a business of brokering whistleblowing for a cut
| of the reward is an obvious risk.
| tptacek wrote:
| I would trust a Murdoch paper more than I would trust
| this site; I would meaningfully trust the WSJ, and I
| don't trust this at all.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Wrong direction, parent is asking for clarity who owns and
| operate the platform itself, not clarity around who the
| whistleblower is.
| 6r17 wrote:
| We all know how this ends lmao
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| took me all of 2 minutes to put a name to one of the folks
| involved in the project.
|
| i think this is a good goal but i question the platform, based
| on this point.
| srameshc wrote:
| Trying to understand who you are but not a single name listed in
| there ? https://www.truthwave.com/about-us
| https://www.truthwave.com/our-team
|
| Mission is good, but how do you protect those people who disclose
| information to you ?
| dns_snek wrote:
| They seem to be more committed to protecting the viability of
| all future business decisions than anyone's anonymity:
|
| > We may share your data with third parties under the following
| circumstances:
|
| > During a Change in Control: If Truthwave undergoes a business
| transaction like a merger, acquisition, corporate divestiture,
| or dissolution (including bankruptcy), or a sale of all or some
| of its assets, we will take appropriate measures to continue to
| protect your anonymity and identity, but may need to share,
| disclose, or transfer all of your data to the successor
| organization during such transition or in contemplation of a
| transition (including during due diligence). (All data
| categories)
|
| https://www.truthwave.com/legal/privacy-policy
| jonstaab wrote:
| > With our unique financial rewards model, scale matters. The
| more justice you unlock, the more monetary compensation you
| receive.
|
| > In fact, we pledge to distribute to tippers $200 million out of
| every $1 billion we collect.
|
| What? Donating 20% of profits is great, but this sounds very
| weird. Is the only thing that drives this revenue donations? In
| which case, why do we need a rent seeking intermediary? Nostr has
| bitcoin tips built in, and you don't have to pay anyone to send
| money to whomever you want.
| dewey wrote:
| > Nostr has bitcoin tips built in, and you don't have to pay
| anyone to send money to whomever you want. Apart from that,
| using a tiny niche platform like Nostr doesn't feel like a good
| comparison if you want to show how "others" are doing it.
|
| Have you tried actually paying with Lighting and Bitcoin
| before? You definitely are paying someone a fee for mining /
| processing the transaction.
| justonmxlinux wrote:
| There is nano which doesn't have any fees at all if you are
| going into that, but personally I would recommend some chain
| like polygon or stellar etc. with low fees and to use
| stablecoins like USDC on top of it, personally, the fees are
| so negligible, and if they are still an impact, maybe pay
| them on nano but polygon's fees are in cents iirc, there are
| other low cost stable coin based tokens too i guess.
|
| For whistleblowing though, Monero would be top tier.
|
| Also I am pretty sure that there are already systems which
| can give a list of numerous crypto accounts from one thing
| but still monero would be my best choice for such kind of
| things tbh given how usdc can still hold/censor your money in
| a somewhat degree y'know, maybe there are some freedom usd
| things or something but at that point, having them in monero
| makes more sense.
|
| These are the few applications of cryptocurrency which can
| genuinely be used (I am a bit of crypto skeptic because I
| don't like what the community has become, my only respect is
| for monero community really and some nano contributors or
| some chain developers in general but they form a very small
| portion and the markets don't move because of them and no
| matter how much trust I have in a project, I don't trust
| markets and I don't want to play a fool's game compared to
| stock markets where there is genuine productivity in
| conservative stock markets generally speaking although that
| productivity is also de-linking thanks to AI in S&P 500 )
|
| To be really honest, I just don't like crypto personally
| except stablecoins and that too in just a very small degree,
| That is my personal experience that I am not going to take
| part in something which feels like an speculative asset no
| matter its use-cases as most of these would just converge on
| one or two and if not, they would have some niche use cases
| and their use case right now is feeling more and more like a
| ponzi scheme more and monero is the only one which doesn't
| feel that way really.
| fdupress wrote:
| Pretty sure that's 20% of revenue, and I'm assuming that their
| business plan relies on skimming from settlements, not just
| taking donations. But they are also paying investigators and
| lawyers out of all of that.
| gamegod wrote:
| If this is a business, which it sure seems like it is, then
| this is such a messed up idea. Exploiting whistleblowers and
| the whistleblowing system for profit. And they're trying to
| incentivize whistleblowers with money too.
|
| Whistleblowers take all of the risk here, and only get 20% of
| the proceeds. Seems like a pretty shit deal, besides being
| confoundingly greedy.
|
| There already are people you can trust, who aren't anonymous,
| who are professionals bound by ethics, and who aren't out to
| sue for profit: Journalists. investigations@icij.org
| aborsy wrote:
| Useful service in my opinion. There are tons of people who would
| want to expose their employer.
|
| But the team must be known, and the company should be
| transparent.
| zzixp wrote:
| One of my favorite darknet diaries episodes is about corporate
| whistleblowing, it's a huge business. If you get a massive 1M+
| payout, chances are the company is getting just as much (if not
| more).
|
| https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/80/
| neilv wrote:
| My first thought on the headline was, "Startup techbros, if
| that's what it is, are about the _last_ people you should trust,
| when the problem is corporate misbehavior, " but I held my snap
| reaction tongue, and went to look:
|
| > _Our founders, who remain anonymous, following in the footsteps
| of some of our nation's most impactful justice efforts,
| understand the inherent challenges faced by those seeking justice
| on an imbalanced playing field._
|
| OK, seriously, who do they expect to trust them?
|
| Actual prospective whistleblowers, or someone else?
|
| > _Once Tips are validated and determined to have a likely
| positive impact on justice, our whistleblowers receive their
| initial compensation. Then, based on the ultimate justice
| achieved, our whistleblowers are compensated again. [...] Earn
| Big Rewards - Tippers can earn rewards of $1,000,000 or more._
|
| Maybe they only need opportunists and scammers to trust them?
|
| And donors/investors? And corporations with a problem-goes-away
| cost-of-business budget?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Looks like a honeypot to me.
| davsti4 wrote:
| They could be NK hackers using the service to target their next
| corporate ransom victim.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| Or corporate espionage
| neilv wrote:
| Trust is key, if you want _legitimate_ whistleblowers.
|
| Anecdote behind thinking a bit about this... I was discussing
| cofounding a startup that incidentally overlapped a bit with
| this space. One of the very top concerns was that we needed to
| be seen as trustworthy, to both employers and workers, and that
| trust would be a significant part of the value that we brought.
|
| Then my prospective cofounder (a real straight-shooter) pointed
| out that one possible side effect of that trust (if we achieved
| it), was that workers might come to us with information about a
| company that we'd be obligated to report to gov't authorities,
| against the expectations of the worker. It was one of the many
| things we'd need to be very clear about, in course of earning
| and honoring the trust that enabled the good stuff we could do.
| exasperaited wrote:
| For fuck's sake. Talk to a lawyer. Pick a newspaper if you can't
| trust a regulator. Find a journalist who you think can cope with
| the nuance. Find two from philosophically opposed publications
| with different owners, maybe in different jurisdictions. Make
| them share it. Talk to them on Signal.
|
| Don't let techbros with a snazzy website template do a middle-man
| act on whistleblowing. Christ. These people just want a cut of
| the settlement.
|
| I mean, this idea is profoundly dangerous. Every link in a
| whistleblowing chain increases the risk of someone being
| threatened, ruined or worse -- hospitalised, defenestrated,
| family threatened -- before they can talk.
|
| If you are going to blow the whistle, be paranoid as fuck. Ask
| the journalists to describe what assurances they get from their
| editor and publisher. Ask them to put you in touch with someone
| who blew the whistle to them and who can safely talk, so you can
| find out how they handled it. Ask them if they've ever had to
| help someone get the hell out of Dodge. Don't trust anyone to
| broker this stuff but yourself.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| This looks like Robinhood for whistleblowing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| How long would it take for anyone to whip up this site, including
| the copy, with AI? This could literally be teenagers.
| antoniojtorres wrote:
| This website looks like they're gonna tell me I can use Zapier to
| get whistleblowing alerts in Slack. Truly bizarre presentation.
| flakiness wrote:
| Newspapers' tip line has a similar feature. I wonder what make a
| whistle-blower pick this over other traditional media (besides
| you're working at one of these.)
|
| eg. https://www.nytimes.com/tips,
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/anonymous-news-tips/
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Whistleblower platforms are usually meant for employees (e.g.
| lower down the org) to anonymously report things to someone
| within the company.
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(page generated 2025-10-30 23:00 UTC)