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Hackathon Hunter AI

The listing is real
or it doesn't ship.

Hunts hackathons and prize challenges. Verification is fail-closed by design: does the official platform actually host this event's source — not a news article about the program. Almost the entire trust burden lives in the gate; what's left is claim-effort-vs-payout sizing, a Strategist argument, not a Skeptic one.

The shape

Almost everything is gate-hard here — that's the point.

Every domain decides its own gate-hard/debate-argued split by how deterministically checkable a risk actually is. For hackathons, "is this real and entrable" is checkable: the platform hosts the listing, the deadline is in the future, the prize pool is documented, the rules say who may enter. What remains for the debate to argue — mostly whether the paperwork is worth the confirmed payout, and watching for the one real scam pattern in this space: fee-charging "recovery services" that attach themselves to a real, free claim.

Live-validated

5 real, currently-open FTC refund programs, ~$0.11 spent.

The Settlement-Claims Scout found five real, currently-open FTC refund programs and correctly cited only the official ftc.gov page for each — so all five verified, legitimately, not from miscalibration. The full pipeline ran end to end on real data: the Ranker scored payout size and certainty, the debate's Skeptic correctly flagged Zelle-payout phishing risk as the actual residual concern for this domain (a real, well-documented fraud pattern), the deterministic mission picked the top 3 within budget, and the digest rendered cleanly.

Known scam pattern this org watches for: lookalike "prize portal" domains impersonating are always free to file directly. Fee-charging "recovery service" middlemen are the Scam Detection Agent's the real platforms — any source that isn't the official listing itself fails the gate outright.

Where it stands

✓ shipped  the gate — official-listing + deadline + prize + eligibility, all hard
✓ shipped  two scout beats — Unclaimed-Property (identity-searched) and Settlement-Claims (FTC/aggregator-discovered)
✓ shipped  full debate/mission/digest pipeline, built on hunter-engine
✓ live-validated  a complete real day-cycle, 2026-07-24
2 offline tests · owner_full_name/former_addresses in config/profile.json are placeholders the user fills in for real identity-search runs