Another Ring of Accounts...
I wasted another few minutes of my life today, checking to see how long it would take me to find another ring of accounts..
First try..
JerryB's bot ^
Booster^
There are more, but in the interest of time...
The account @stratilatkryuko buys votes for a small network of Accounts. The money gets swapped around and eventually leaves steem.
I guess this person might just be generous.
It buys votes for a number of accounts
@vampiretta
@annaguzc
@tanata
@natalyaborqo
@garik-vrn
I didn't spend much time on it, but I couldn't find one human engaging with any of these posters.
To be fair they also put some money in to keep up the activity. Although it goes out of the other accounts.
Once again, I will send it to @themarkymark. He can update the blacklist if he so chooses.
With the price this low and real activity continuing to fall, I feel like this is a shame, but I also think we deserve it. The white paper says, not all abuse can be stopped, but it doesn't say abuse should be ignored.
This is one of the reasons real content can't get visibility and it is draining not just the reward pool but the price of steem.
I'm not an abuse finding police type of person. I do not enjoy doing this, and no one enjoys hearing about it.
Yet, I can't ignore that it is happening.
Signed Grumpy @whatsup
@whatsup,
It's not easy to find these details without consuming time! You found the ring and i don't know whether it's an abuse or not! Coz by the way by spending that money on Bots, I don't think he/she could make a good profit at the end!
Cheers~
great recherche again. I looked at some of the profiles and its well saturated with plagiarised photos, @vampiretta even decribing in detail how she made all these beautiful photos proofable stolen from gettyimages.
figures... I noticed they tend to share photos also.
Great detective work!
I've long suspected that while so many people have been freaking out about plagiarism posts that make about 40 cents, there are huge piles of scammers making secret money off the radar, and the people who could do something about that are all doing it as well.
But it's all just too geek for me so I'm flinging votes and coloured pictures about to make things more exciting :)
There are a bunch that "Scammer" might be too strong of a word... but those who get zero engagement with others and use a small network of accounts to stay just off the radar, but take large rewards from the reward pool.
I'm hoping that someone uncovers this stuff because there are several names I'd like to check out. But having said that, with cryptos all being dragged down at the moment, I think Steem is already being pulled down hard by that, let alone by all the problems within Steemit, I'm now thinking it's all downhill till Xmas whatever we do. So I'll just take a deep breath, avoid making bleating sounds, and post a picture :) (I took this photo at the beach near us on Wednesday)
Love this one too!
i was thinking about the very subject of abuse this morning and recalled reading the white paper.
While it is impossible to stop abuse, you cannot ignore it, and you also cannot make an environment that is easy for scammers to take advantage of. That is simply what happens when you create a money tree and combine it with unlimited ROI bots.
The only way to combat this loss is to put a stop to the abuse by making it too expensive to abuse. For example, in order to forge US dollars, you would need to make it very expensive to make forged money. Continuously change the dies and inks so the forgers have to keep working to keep up with technology.
We cannot do that here, but we need to find ways to replicate the difficulty. One way is to making vote bots have a negative ROI by making them pay their share of access to steem nodes. This would drive down activity on the blockchain and reduce cost all around.
The byproduct of this will either be the downfall of the blockchain, or a renaissance because all of the SP holders now have to find new ways to make profit from their locked in SP.
Yeah, I was hoping that visibility would hold enough value to take any and all profit out of it.
Shining a light on abusers is just sharing the good info with us. The minutes spent investigating this is for the betterment of the blockchain and we should all follow your lead.
Thanks from all of us for doing this. No abuse on your watch!
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Taking vote from bot is not profitable.
Good work.
For some reason whenever I read one of these posts, I can't help but think about how I myself have bought OCDB upvotes for friends occasionally. I hope no one ever thinks I'm in some kinda ring. :P
I also sometimes buy upvotes for people I don't even know, if it's an exceptional post with a really low reward. It's easier than ever to find post that are quite good with only a few cents worth of upvotes. Sadly, not everyone that's a great poster is in OCD's whitelist though. I think this is because they took quite a while off.
I think it would probably be good to create a bot to try to detect these. Unfortunately, they'd probably flag it to shit.
I've bought votes for lots of people. Here are the signs... Low effort posts with no engagement, why would someone buy a vote? Doing a lot of it... Low SP, lots of liquid steem. and the money moves from account to account.
It would be hard to mix it up with real effort, engagement and the type of post someone would throw a vote on.
Doesn't stop my paranoia. :P
Yeah, I know it's pretty easy to figure out that these people are doing voting rings. A little harder when they aren't low effort posts. There have been a few high profile people involved in them on here in the past.
Thank you for pointing this out.
Hello Grumpy, and your efforts are appreciated. Please don’t stop doing what you do. Thanks again.
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