My discord and telegram fill up with mindless bots (or maybe real people) spamming links and 1000%+ ROI claims in order to try to get someone to click on their invite link; so that leads me to the question, do bounty programs really work?
Yes it really works. They are just using mindless bots in order to attract investors, although that's not a good thing ethically but, they are being used that way. Bounty program really works by putting links to the IEO/ICO site of the project. It's a way of advertising the project itself.