Smell Fraud? This Telegram App Was Built to Reward Whistleblowers

AlphaTON CEO Brittany Kaiser views the Telegram-focused tech firm’s latest contribution to the messaging platform’s ecosystem as deeply personal.

Since she blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica’s internal practices in 2018, which involved the misuse of personal data and its role in influencing elections through psychological profiling, she told Decrypt that swaths of people have reached out yearning to follow in her footsteps.

“I’ve had hundreds of people reach out to me from all over the world to ask about how they go through this,” she said. “Certainly, it was not straightforward for me.”

Earlier this week, AlphaTON introduced a Telegram app called Vera Report alongside the Midnight Foundation, the organization stewarding a network oriented around privacy and data protection, a vision led by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson.

Vera Report functions as an anonymous reporting platform, enabling would-be whistleblowers to submit data to government agencies and law firms willing to represent them in potential lawsuits. 

But that information can’t be accessed without the permission of the person who provided it. That’s due to Vera Report’s use of so-called confidential computing and zero-knowledge proofs, among other features like scrubbing metadata from documents, according to a press release.

“There are very many different privacy features on here to make sure that people can fully anonymously submit evidence,” Kaiser said. “We’ve actually open-sourced the data so that everybody can contribute on what they actually need to see in this, either for whistleblowers to feel more comfortable or for different government agencies to actually make use of it.”

In September, the Nasdaq-listed firm rebranded from Portage Biotech, a clinical-stage immuno-oncology firm developing cancer treatments. The pivot entailed the creation of a Toncoin treasury, dedicated to the native currency of The Open Network, which was initially designed by Telegram founders Pavel and Nikolai Durov.

The Telegram app is partially a response to calls that the Trump administration has made, alongside figures like former DOGE head and tech CEO Elon Musk, for whistleblowers to step forward amid a push to identify government fraud, waste, and abuse.

“That seemed like a huge opportunity to create some privacy-centric technology tools so that more people from around the country would be able to do that safely,” Kaiser said.

Kaiser envisions it as a tool that different government departments and law enforcement agencies could actually integrate into their websites. Tips from whistleblowers have led to the detection of 43% of occupational fraud, dwarfing internal audits (14%) and management reviews (13%), according to a 2024 report from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

As noted by Kaiser, whistleblowers typically receive a 15% to 30% cut of what is won out of lawsuits brought against companies committing fraud. If Vera’s users are eligible for a reward, then the app allows people to provide know-your-customer information for a payout.

“Obviously, that’s not an immediate process,” she added. “The result that they’re looking for […] is normally to solve the problem that they’re upset about.”