Case 11: Aliexpress and some voting-bots, making rewards without an effort!
Accusation:
A few days ago, an anonymous tipster sent me this link and a simple question:
"Is this ok or should I flag this?"
So let us take a look, a low effort spam-post featuring a single image from Aliexpress with a "self-goat", that's not really a big deal, or is it?
The Findings:
Naturally the linked post wasn't the only one following this scheme that had been posted by the accused account, @hamayun, but for the sake of argument let's look at this as an isolated incident first.
Bot-voting on low effort posts
Some will say this is totally legitimate.
After all, there is no rule that defines an effort-threshold for what is allowed to be posted on the blockchain and if someone uses an established service to "invest" their money into an upvote, that certainly doesn't break any rules either.
That's correct!
But, if we continue looking at this objectively, we must also recognize that the rules allow for discontent with the exhibited behavior just as much, and downvoting such posts cannot be deemed any less legitimate!
Now that this is out of the way, let's look beyond the scope of just that single post.
Increase the volume for maximized profit!
I already mentioned that this wasn't an isolated incident.
The account @hamayun had been silent for several weeks before starting his Aliexpress-scheme 6 days ago, but with their consistent use of the various upvoting services they did manage to gain a decent little pending reward balance already:
source: steemnow.com
Ok, not even $40 and only a dozen posts, that's not a huge amount and only little spam.
Fortunately most voting-bots work with some sort of limitation on how much rewards you will be able to buy from them, and we all know that too much spam can easily bring you negative attention. Luckily for the greedy players out there, there's an easy workaround to this.
Just make more accounts!
No surprise, @hamayun didn't come alone.
It's sibling-account and faithful voting buddy, @humayalz had started the Aliexpress-scheme over 4 weeks ago already, successfully raising their voting power from 4 SP at the beginning of September to 78 SP now.
source: steemwhales.com
In addition to the "earned" voting power, @humayalz has access to a 3,750 SP delegation, leased through @minnowbooster.
We obviously have some witty "investor" working hard for their "ROI" here.
Let's do the usual and follow the money.
Introducing @cryptokraze alias Umair Rajput.
Both @humayalz and @hamayun as well as 13 other accounts are being sponsored by @cryptokraze.
@cryptokraze himself is not new to the virtue of low-effort posting and bot-votes. He has been making a steady income with screenshots from coinmarketcap.com for weeks himself.
Umair also isn't new to the virtue of running a multitude of accounts. His legacy facebook presence shows he is known as both Umair Afzal and "Trader Boy" Umair Rajput.
At least his personal interest in trading and investments seems genuine. I'd take his advice and analysis with a grain of salt, though. Someone who gets involved with MMM-Global clearly doesn't do his due diligence properly!
source: Umair Rajput on facebook
read more about the MMM-Global ponzi on wikipedia and independent.co.uk
Umair is not an absolute cheater.
Some of his sponsored accounts may even be legitimate people.
But all the accounts he has sponsored are engaged in the same "investment strategy", low-effort posting and bot-voting.
I would also say that it's safe to guess that most of of the accounts are probably being used by Umair himself, though. Despite some identities closely resembling his legacy social media friends, their activity and coordination strongly suggest Umair himself is behind them.
Here's the full list of accounts he has sponsored so far: @cryptokraze himself, @aunj, @qasimwaqar, @talhasaeed, @mwaqar309, @alonrtpve, @rehanhashmat, @rizwanphe, @desiretech, @hamayun, @humayalz, @aqeelch, @atifafzal, @messirajput, @ahmadraza123 and @maqeel.
Some of these accounts are a few months old but have been mostly inactive, some show consistent activity, a few even exhibit somewhat authentic content, most of them had run-ins with @cheetah for plagiarizing, all of them know how to maximize their rewards with bot votes and all of them received SBD from @cryptokraze to pay for those votes when needed.
I have contacted some of the legacy social media friends to see if they are knowingly involved with steemit but I have not received any replies so far. Should I learn something new from this in the next days, I will update this post accordingly.
update: Umair has responded to this post, both in the comment section and to me directly via discord, he insists that all of the accounts he sponsored belong to individuals, friends and family, which I do find very hard to believe. Their comment exchanges are seemingly random interactions while their financial ties show a more than obvious connection. I could go to lengths to elaborate on all the circumstantial evidence to support my impression, but I'd much rather stick to the facts and would argue, that even if the accounts did belong to distinct individuals, their actions remain the same. At least Umair has pledged to consider the effort he puts into posting and he will "guide the others" to do so as well. He promised those Aliexpress posts will stop.
To flag or not to flag?
I will go ahead and start flagging a dime off of those Aliexpress posts for sure. Simply because that's plain spam.
For the rest of their activities, I'd welcome a lively disussion on your own verdict in the comments below!
yours,
Sherlock
P.S.: It's a pity to see ponzi-schemes like MMM-Global still making the rounds and targeting the most desperate victims they can reach. Be careful when someone promises you insane returns without actually having any business to back it up with. The cryptocurrency scene is flooded with similar schemes, fraudulent ICOs and scammy tokens, so be careful, your chances of loosing your investment are often much larger than any potential gains!
Would it be justified to blacklist or even nuke these accounts?
Share your subjective verdict on the exposed accounts and their activities!
Don't decide impulsively, I encourage you to take a first-hand look at them.
Update: Please also see Umair's own comments below.
Thank you for posting @sherlockholmes.
Steemians appreciate your attention to detail.
There is use of the system and then there is abuse of the system.
As @patrice has indicated there are multiple reasons people have multiple accounts and it is allowed........of course you will always have those who are not responsible with the freedom that have multiple accounts. The query is what determines when the practise of having multiple accounts is abuse....is it one more account....twenty more accounts.
Every organisation has policy, purpose and a chain of command.
Perhaps Steemit would be better served to stipulate what the best practice or policy is.......it seems hard to determine......especially when those who are large SP holders are working under their own policy and then others copy them.
Regards, bleujay
Indeed! But probably the quantity isn't the critical factor, it's more about the usage of those accounts.
Being the decentralized community that it is, maybe we need to start coming up with our own policies and decentralized countermeasures in the community.
Is it?
If you are supposed to authenticate an account through a process, how would that be assumed to mean that multiple accounts are okay? Also, if people go through the trouble of Verifying who they are, it would point to that multiple accounts are definitely not approved by the community.
Steemit.com has that policy for sign-ups, but I'd argue this is solely related to the sign-up-bonus they are giving to new accounts.
Having multiple accounts cannot be prevented, as technically anyone with an existing account can create new ones by himself.
But, yes, almost all multi-account abusers have circumvented that steemit.com sign-up policy as well!
They are at it again. I just reported one photo for plagiarism and it got 11$ upvote
could you be more specific? are you referring to the stock-image posted by @rehanhashmat?
I keep checking these, too. I have sent a reminder to @minnowbooster, they have just finished implementing their blacklisting feature and have opened an abuse-reporting channel on their discord
Hey man where have you been. Steemit needs you investigative skills more now than ever.
I have left behind the illusion of felicity where my mind had taken refuge.
Indeed, I am making my way back to my study at Baker St. 221B, where I have however instructed my dear friend Watson to refuse receiving any more visitors.
I reported it for plagiarism. https://steemit.com/sports/@hamayun/baseball-is-so-much-loved-sports
He is the first account you mentioned. The second one is also doing the same.
https://steemit.com/food/@humayalz/chineese-fried-rice-with-chicken-manchurian
The above post is basically saying, I am thinking about my meal and then he wrote the same thing in Hindi in English phonetic. Could you report both of these accounts to minnowbooster?
Thank you for revealing this! In my opinion these Aliexpress posts are Clearly spam and deserve a flag.
Speaking as minnowbooster we are currently improving our blacklist efforts to make blacklisting users who abuse the bot a lot easier. I will remember this post and retroactively ban them from using the service in the future.
I personally have nothing against friends supporting each other but having multiple accounts and using most of your votes for them is nothing I want to support.
Since minnowbooster is in a tricky situation here, I would love to hear suggestions from the community how to best detect and prevent this.
I think it would be interesting to calculate a "worth to upvote" threshold.
Where minnowbooster would calculate a certain ratio between links/images/text.
Nevertheless, they might change their posts to include a huge list of tags in the text to avoid that.
I order to solve something semi automatic might be nice.
Using the treshhold calculated early. But, this time allow minnowbooster to vote and send an email to the admins so they might remove the vote and bann the account.
Over time this calculation might be improved.
"Worth to upvote" that's a great idea. But how to scale it properly? New talented minnows have no "worth" to measure automatically. A post with a good vlog might not qualify to the "worth" ratio as described above, while a plagiarized post could...
Finding a solution to help minnows and prevent boosting the "un-worthly" is probably best done via a blacklist at the moment. @reggaemuffin I'd suggest manual blacklisting based on @sherlockholmes, @cheetah and @steemcleaners reports. I think there are willing and qualified people at the MB discord channel to help reach consensus over accounts to blacklist and ban from using the service.
Btw: I used MinnowBooster on my last post, look how it catapulted my blog suddenly. Your service is much much appreciated!!
Our first step is allowing all MB moderators to blacklist users. We then could have a reporting channel where people can discuss. And then go from there if a more sophisticated approach is needed.
Glad you like the service we provide, tip!
That's the right approach. Simple, practical, do-able and smart.
What is this tip! voodoo magic??
It is a pretty cool bot 😎
Must be a german who coded it.
Well minnowbooster is coded by a German 😜 I think tipu is too, but you would have to ask @cardboard yourself
Hi @reggaemuffin! @fitzgibbon is sending you 0.1 SBD tip and @tipU upvote
:)
@tipU - send tips by writing tip! in the comment, get share of the profit :)Hi @fitzgibbon! @reggaemuffin is sending you 0.5 SBD tip and @tipU upvote
:)
From @reggaemuffin : If You Like What I Do, Vote Me For Witness :)Yes, I agree that steemit needs to have a quality control system.
I think it might be possible to develop a project of "clean" votes ... as well as projects are carried out to evaluate and vote on high value publications in their content could also be tracked the fate of the votes made by the big bots of voting ...
I believe that this way you can quickly develop these black lists of opportunistic users who seek to generate income with poor publications. It would also be a way of controlling those who really deserve to be rewarded for their efforts.
To develop an idea like this I would be willing to offer me to follow the destiny of the votes and make the benefits reach the people who have really worked for them!
Says the guy who upvotes them which encourage them to do it even more. And they have renewed their activity. Read more about it in my post, The low quality posters are back, and this time they are making a lot more in rewards
Minnowbooster is currently developing a blacklist like I said in the post. They are already on our backlog of people to ban. If you mean my personal vote, that is because I am testing out a frontrun feature for minnowbooster.
Many might not agree with me but I think clique voting or self-voting when you have one or more accounts goes to intent. I have @zoee as well and would like to power it up and use it as a bot eventually. I occasionally upvote @zoee or use @zoee to upvote @patrice.
I think their intent here is clear whether the accounts are owned by a single person or multiple people. As a community we need to make sure groups like this one and the larger one like @simonjones do not make a profit off of gaming @minnowbooster, @minnowsupport, and other programs.
If this was a group of friends posting 'real' content and interacting with the community as well I don't know that I would have a problem with it.
I agree with you.. Really, everything has the two sides to it... While I am not in support of those numerous multiple accounts, attention must be also on those making quality contents but having no votes... Many must have resorted to probably leasing SPs and voting oneanother. I think it's a way of keeping themselves on this platform else, this place will be for the whales alone. Before any doubt is placed on @minnowbooster 's upvote bot and leasing service, considerations should be on the numerous value they are giving.
Not sure, really. My first reaction: ignore those shit and safe your votingpower for upvoting good content. Then I took a look at this accounts and I said instantly „what the heck!? Nuke them!“
But the huge problem behind this is not so much the abuse of voting-bots to get „rich in short time“. It is the mentality of seeing an opportunity to infiltrate a system where others work hard to deliver value. Yesterday I read the whitepaper of steemit and as far as I understood, those spammers are not welcomed, but accepted up to a certain point because -even if it’s garbage – they are still taking action.
So I perceive steemit as a living entity that has an „immune system“ against such viruses. You can ignore, flag, blacklist etc. to let them starve out. So we could only wait and hope, they will lose interest in this. BUT you have to consider, that even 0,2 SBD for people in developing countries is much money. So they will find it still worthy to open even more accounts to spread useless content to gain even a few cents. And this can become epidemic, where the normal „immune system“ of steemit might need some support. I am really concerned at the moment and have no idea how to prevent this. At least I think it’s not helpful to „nuke them“, because it’s easy to open a new account and start with fresh reputation lvl 25.
It’s a matter of education I think. There are so many good guides and advices here on steemit, how to make it right. But when they are ignored by spammers, you can shout as loud as you can - they won’t hear you. Spammers gonna spam... :(
This, right here, is remarkably important. I watched another content-for-pay site get taken down because of this very issue... three specific locations where making $100 a month would be "a really BIG deal" in your life. The warnings were ignored because the company was based in the US and the prevalent attitude was that "it was just small amounts," but it's remarkable how quickly a rewards pool can be drained when you have thousands out there "mining for fractional cents" 24/7...
hey @sherlockholmes - last night i was scammed bu optimisticguy who promised $5 in upvotes for $2 sent to him - saying he is backed by 250 loyal steemians and my money is guareenteed. As it turned out the only way my money was guareenteed was too be lost. He has sent these messages to hundreds of people and probably taken hundreds of dollars out of our community through fraud in the last day. My money was given back to me by a kind steemian and i am only telling you cause i want @optimisticguy stopped from withdrawing his criminally gained money.
I've put @optimisticguy on my list of leads. Maybe he is running more scams like that.
In the meantime, I suggest to anyone NOT to interact with any such offers, a lot of scammers are making similar rounds on steemit.chat and the various discord servers as well as promoting with 0.001 transactions.
thanks sherlock- @lovelygirl sent me the same offer 24 hours later -scammers
And as a little "twist" to this, @optimisticguy is now accusing @lovelygirl of "stealing" his program/system...
all i know is - i paid optimisticguy $4 and never got any upvotes- he is a scammer and if lovelygirl ripped him off , it wouldn't surprise me .. They are in it together
Unfortunately, the decentralized platform is setup so that it CANNOT stop withdrawals or anything affecting the wallet.
As far as I know, even @steemit cannot freeze or access anyone's account.
Be thankful for this, because if someone could....ABUSE MUCH WORSE THAN THIS COULD HAPPEN!
Sorry for your bad experience.
Peace!
fair enough - i hope not too many people are losing money
That scam is one of the oldest in mmo games. Often the scammers have a crowd of alt accounts or buddies vouching in public chat for the veracity of the scam. Sometimes they actually send the double and triple money back in small amounts, hoping that a greedy cash rich player will then go all in and transfer them a large amount of currency.
thanks corpsvalues - i am now following you and wish you well -- looking forward to friendship
Posting a single photo and then using bots to game the system deserves some smack down. They're not even trying and just abusing @minnowbooster and @randowhale since the ROI is favourable.
I could post a picture of my toe and make money by sending @randowhale and @minnowbooster $1.50. Nuke them. From orbit.
I would also like to provide some more evidence on the fake account ring I mentioned a week or so ago. Please review the following transfer history that corroborates the connections between funadda, vevosongs, foxnews.com, movieclip, funnyordie, hdporn and buzzfeed.com. After being reported to @patrice and @steemcleaners they lay low for a week but at least one account is posting again and in the meantime extracting gains to funadaa.
tips hat
Thanks for sharing your opinion.
I've filed your leads and will look at them when I find the time!
LOL... please don't
Hehehe... Are you saying I don't have photogenic toes?
just don't prove me wrong :P
Heres an interesting idea. Strip people like this of all their accounts bar one (That should be the default for everyone anyway.) Not sure how you could definitively prove ownership but it's a thought. :-)
Problem is that Steemit don't control the accounts. It's like Bitcoin accounts in that each user has the control. All we can do is to flag accounts to destroy their reputation, but that doesn't stop them moving funds around.
Sadly, life and experience has taught me that only honourable people care about reputation. The vast majority couldn't give a tinkers fart what others think while in pursuit of money. :-(
Such dishonorable inventivness is typical of the cash starved but internet savvy netizens of countries like India, Indonesia, Pakistan etc. As @laylahsophia pointed out in her post above, even small 0.2 SBD rewards are enough motivation for them.
I fear that this can to become a survival issue because there is nothing inherently in Steem that will 'reward' quality rather than 'quantity'. (Quantity obtained from 100 bot-accounts/paid followers who mindlessly upvote/ downvote whatever you tell them to)
Do we have some sort of overriding delegated authority though? Like, A downvote from a senior enough member should become punitive enough. The problem is then that this goes against the whole concept of decentralization :(
Can we have community-chosen grand wardens. That'd be cool..Though there'll have to be some mechanism to avoid entrenchment of power..
Wow..I should write a post with these ideas.:)
Fortunately closing accounts or taking them away is not an option in a decentralized system like steem.
:-(
Excellent analysis, as always.
My default is definitely a "live and let live" one, so although i'm not interested in using any of the voting bots, I've not been opposed to others devising them and using them for the most part.
But if you think it through, to it's logical conclusion, I think these voting bots are harmful to what is trying to be built on Steemit. It's supposed to be a social media platform. Who wants to be social with a bunch of bots? I don't.
I'm beginning to lose some of my initial interest in Steem for two main reasons: the plethora of bots and the ability of people to have a multitude of accounts. Some people literally have hundreds of accounts, and it gives them an inordinate amount of inappropriate power.
Sorry, but I have no idea what the right answer is to all of that.
I'm afraid you are not alone with losing interest due to witnessing abuse on many levels!
Thanks for sharing your views!
tips hat
Things like Minnowbooster are rife for abuse. I see they have responded to this. This is why I think we need trusted blacklists to deal with those who try to cheat the system.
Indeed, I am beginning to be less in opposition to blacklisting, but I will continue to stress that we need to keep that decentralized and work with some sort of redundancy.
For now it looks like each service would do best to run their own blacklist, I am surprised to learn @minnowbooster is yet to implement one, but it's still great to see they are reacting to the situation!
Hi @sherlockholmes! I had around 30 Upvotes in 2 hours after I made a post last night. Here's the link: https://steemit.com/health/@yoginiofoz/stress-can-make-you-sick
In the comments after my essay, I put a request to you that I might have a new case to be solved. The case of the one attempting to portray the many.
I made a screen shot of several Upvoters who obviously are new to Steemit and have never posted nor commented as of this morning.
And while I am flattered to get 35 Upvotes in a span of only a couple of hours, I am less-than-enthusiastic about spam-like votes.
Since I am still very new to the Steemit world, please forgive me if this isn't something you deal with or I am asking the wrong person. Maybe there is even a link on how to deal with ghost accounts.
Thanks again for everything you do. I am a big fan!!!
I like that term.
But in all seriousness, there is unfortunately not much that can be done about these "voting ghosts" and there are a few thousand at least already roaming the steem blockchain.
I took a look at the ones voting for you and in fact they are new "ghosts" to me. I've filed this lead in my backlog for further investigation when I find the time.
You are awesome, @sherlockholmes! I just thought I would bring this to your attention. I look forward to reading your informative posts in the future!