Case 7.1: how a spammer revealed a scammer - ft. a greedy kid telling stupid liessteemCreated with Sketch.

in #steemit-police7 years ago (edited)

Sherlock Holmes Header

Accusation:

During my investigations for Case 7, I stumbled upon, what initially looked like a promising clue.

While inspecting the "farm-grounds", old posts that were used to post spam-comments, a series of quite obviously connected accounts stood out. Most notably so: @vexana, @colorblind & @tigreal.

There are quite a few more connected accounts, but I am highlighting these specifically, as they show an obvious money-trail, leading straight to a previously identified scammer known as @renepaolo alias @aut0matic alias @hundreddays.

For a moment, I thought I had the operator of the comment-farm right under my fingertips!

The Findings

But something didn't match up.

@renepaolo had previously been busted for abusing the @minnowsupport group. @renepaolo's crude cheat was too obvious and too primitive to believe he would be capable of setting up a farm with almost 2000 automated accounts.

One thing was certain to me, though, @renepaolo did not stop cheating back then. He had continued setting up more accounts, again pretending to be multiple genuine individuals and trying to gain more rewards by using MSP with all of them.

I decided it was best to talk to the perpetrator directly in order to learn what he himself had to say about everything.

Now let me tell you the pitiful story of...

A Greedy Kid Telling Lots of Stupid Lies!

If you just came for a list of accounts, you'll want to scroll straight down to the footer. In the meantime, I will serve this story with a dab of sarcasm, it's just too silly to be presented dry.

Prologue: How Rene was caught before.

One fine day in June 2017, Rene made an account with steemit.com - @aut0matic.

A great start of something new, he would be rich soon! He's a smart guy, an entrepreneur, a motivational speaker, this would be a walk in the park, for sure!

But the days passed, and his glorious introduction post just didn't get those thousand dollar upvotes it certainly would have deserved.

O.k., Rene doesn't give up that easily. Let's try again, this time with a better account-name - @renepaolo. Maybe he did brag a little too much last time, let's make the new introduction a bit more personal.

This time he actually made a few dollars, yep, this was going to be huuuuge!

People would probably soon praise him for the great things he did.

But with the first gains, also came the greed!

There had to be a way to make more money quicker!

Yeah, lets tell those gullible idiots a sad story about a terminally ill person.

A week after introducing his real self, he had signed up for another account and invented the story of 19 year old Michael, sick with stage 3 brain cancer and with only 100 days left to live - @hundreddays:

I only have 100 days left, so all I can do is save for my burial expenses. In this way, I won't be another burden when I'm gone.

What's wrong with people? Yes all of you people, only 8 of you upvoted that heartbreaking introduction! Tell me, what kind of a cruel world do we live in?

But, Rene is an entrepreneur, a motivational speaker, and he knows everything about making money online, enough to provide online courses about it!

So, Rene knew there was one last truly idiot-proof way to fulfill his dreams of fame and fortune!

A few days and a dozen new accounts later, an endless stream of shitty memes started flowing.

But real humans still didn't care, he needed @minnowsupport to upvote all his crap. And 2 votes per day and account is way too stingy, so lets trick the MSP Discord into allowing more than that. Simply register even more fake-accounts over there, too.

Yeah, don't mess with @aut0matic, he knows his 1337 hax0r trickz!

Caught with a hand in the cookie jar: tries blaming his besties!

What he was doing started to be a little too obvious. When his abuse of the @minnowsupport voting-bot was finally discovered, Rene, smart and laborious as he is, thought he knew exactly how to use this situation to his own favor, again.

Time for more lies, yay :D

Of course, abusing the MSP initiative was something a faithful good Christian, like Rene himself, would never ever do!

No, that was all done by a random guy he had met at church, to whom he gave his private keys, just to help a desperate fellow Christian paying off the hospital bills of his sick grandfather.

A few low quality pictures of an empty hospital room must certainly be enough to convince everyone. In the meantime, snap a selfie with your friend and provide it as "rock solid evidence" showing you and him, not being the same person.

But even having his oblivious good friend posing for a picture couldn't sway public opinion anymore. The community had enough of his show and Rene seemed to have surrendered to the downvotes.

Main Act: He didn't really stop there, did he?!

Let's skip forward to last week, entering the stage: my humble self.

I had noticed some of his old fake-identities being farmed in Case 7 and was able to see him using a bunch of new accounts still. After learning the details about his old story from the fine folks at @minnowsupport, it was rather easy to find a way to get in touch with him.

Though it was a bit hard to get him to actually talk initially, I had to go to the lengths of involving his girlfriend and his friend (the one he tricked into posing for proof @hunddreddays wasn't him) before Rene was finally willing to respond himself.

I establish rather quickly, that he in fact wasn't the brightest bulb on the shelf and he did not run the big farm that drew my attention onto him to begin with, after keeping the verbal thumb-screws tight for a while, he eventually had to confess to the continued abuse of @minnowsupport, even after the known incidents:

It started a few months ago when I joined Steemit. First, I had an account named @aut0matic. But then I realized I want to use my name instead. So I created a new account with my name on it, and named it @renepaolo. I used minnowsupport to both of it. After some days of using minnowsupport and earning around $1-$1.5 per post, I realized that if I create more accounts, I can earn more. So I did. I created a first account using hundreddays. I was desperate to earn more so I tried making a fake story to earn more. But when it didn't earn much, I just used it to create memes as well. So I posted memes manually every day, and created discordapps. I connected several discordapps per one steemit account. After 2-4 weeks, fraenk discovered about it. He tried to talk with me about it. But I got scared. So I avoided it with more lies. I also talked with aggroed but still used the same lies I used with fraenk. He told me to come clean, but I still didn't. The first apology post didn't go well, the second did not go well either. So I decided to just leave it and power down.

After a week, I did the same scheme I used. But this time, I registered one steemit account per discordapp. I also created main account wherein I post what I wanna post. In the process of doing it, I decided to create an ebook as a giveaway for my blog. It's called the 7-day challenge. There I teach about Steemit and how to earn from it. I explained the basics, but I did not tell about minnowsupport.

A few day/s before you contacted me here on facebook, I stopped posting memes. I just checked it now, the last meme I posted was 6 days ago. I also posted an introductory post to one.

He elaborated further:

I created several accounts using the service REDACTED. REDACTED you can get numbers to verify any account. I mainly use REDACTED numbers for the accounts.As for the email accounts I used, I used numbered email accounts such as 1@REDACTED.com, and so on. This is to register steemit accounts, and for the multiple discordapps.

On the first phase, (that's the time of hundreddays), I post like 12-15 memes per day manually. So I post to one, then log out, then post to another, logout. By the time I finish the cycle, at least 5 minutes have elapsed already. And that's when I start to post again. I then do the same process with discordapps to upvote my accounts.

On the second phase, this is where I post only 2 memes a day, This is after the hundreddays incident. After my confession. This time, I only post twice a day per account, and upvote twice a day per account.That's every after 12 hours.

Again, this is all done manually.

It looked like Rene was willing to confess to everything he had done. Everything he said, including the list of accounts he was willing to name, did match up and made it ultimately doubtful he could be the one running a big farming-op.

Epilogue: Why am I posting all this.

This will serve to justify and explain for my own actions.

In order to make sure Rene would not continue cheating indefinitely I had asked him to hand over the owner keys of his fake accounts, I even offered he could keep 2 accounts under his own control.

I focused on other things to give him some time to reflect and he actually did start handing over some owner keys to a few of his accounts. When I asked what was up with the rest, he only had this to say:

Hi! Some of the accounts I put on the list are not really used for spam meme accounts like renepaolo and aut0matic, and wealthguru and speedcuber. However, for others, I'm just doing a power down for it. I'll send you the owner keys of the others which I'm not powering down. Rest assured that there will be no posts coming from those I am powering down.

I warned him, that if he insisted in stealing every last penny from the platform, I would feel obligated to drag him into the spotlight, again.

I offered him to keep his face and his name, which are so easily connected to his real identity, to myself. Not publish this case, if only he was willing to give up control over his fake accounts.

Rene, to this date, has refused any further cooperation and communication. Instead, he keeps powering down and extracting his cheated rewards.

All he wanted was to become rich and famous, but he focused on the money too much!

Now he's getting famous for things he would probably prefer to remain his dirty little secret.

Let's hope he buys his girlfriend a nice present from the money he was able to rake in.

yours,
Sherlock


I have taken control over the following accounts:
@teammeme; @sanman; @keyboardsurfer; @alleria; @alphaye; @hymersmith; @niceone; @tinmendes; @randoshark; @mandible; @craniumbasher; @chickfillet; @akaila; @eudora; @clintcape;

He insists staying in control of and continues removing the remaining SP from the following accounts:
@renepaolo; @aut0matic; @hundreddays; @nobrainer; @brainer; @bloodless; @krustykrab; @spongeb0b; @squidward; @patrickangelo; @ptcuber; @patriciangela; @speedcuber; @vexana; @tigreal; @granpa; @wealthguru; @speedsteem; @colorblind

Total currency already extracted: 850 SBD & 80SP
Available SP still under his control: 450SP.

What will happen to the accounts under my control? I don't know, for now I am keeping their keys, maybe they will help flagging or researching in another case? Eventually I will just destroy their keys!

I have redacted some details from this post to keep Rene's privacy protected. At least as far as possible, after he miserably failed to do so himself! Also, Rene has been notified that this has gone public!


Seen anything suspicious?

Don't just ignore it and move on... do something! (or let me know)

I believe this post includes enough information to be convincing, if you have ANY doubts, do not hesitate to question me!

Resteem This For Visibility!

Sort:  

They call him Holmes, Sherlock Holmes.

If for whatever reason I decide to create any other accounts, I'm going to make a post telling people publicly that I have.

At least that way, if I do decide to upvote myself for some reason, people will know it was me and I'll have to justify why I done it.

That's the commendable attitude!

I opened a few accounts last year because I thought I wanted to have one for posting fiction, one for posting non-fiction, etc. I've since decided to consolidate most of my posts into my main account (this one). But I don't think having more than one account is necessarily a bad or suspicious thing. Many people writing bots open separate accounts, including many well-respected whales.

No, and I would not want to make the impression, that having multiple accounts or outlets by itself is anything nefarious.

I think you and your partner's accounts along with your alts are fine, it's pretty clear and you don't make a secret about running these. It's when a user signs up with multiple accounts just to receive more rewards, potentially by self-enforced voting chains, that things do get a little bit questionable.

Even more so if a sock-puppet account is used to pity-fool people for upvotes. Unfortunately there's a lot of this going on.

The way you are reviving one of your alts with upvotes from you or your partner, could be considered self-voting, but that's a debate for the guys in the ethics department. I am only looking for scams and cheats.

edit: I'd actually appreciate if you did self-vote your original comment, just to make this more visible, if you don't mind. Having multiple accounts is nothing wrong - Running Scams is!

Will do (self-voting the comment)... this actually brings up another issue near and dear to my heart. @jimitations and I always double-upvote the quality comments on our posts. It rewards people who interact with us and it moves their comments up above the spam and the bot comments. We're working on an initiative to promote the upvoting of quality comments. It's still in the planning stages, but hopefully it'll be up and running soon and I'm hoping the movement will dissuade and in some ways punish spam comments. Time will tell, though, if it can actually do that. We'll see. :)

(btw - upvoting @geke's comment didn't move the thread up, so we upvoted @futuristgear's comment)

Yes, that was my mistake, I should have checked and was under the impression @geke started the thread.

Hey guys, people really need to bring more attention to this. Check out some of my posts on it, if you want to: https://steemit.com/steemit-police/@alex-icey/steemit-spam-report-8-20-17-or-more-spam-someone-with-a-bigger-voting-power-needs-to-help

But anyways, thanks for your help. I've been trying to makes posts to bring awareness to specific spammers, and hopefully we can weed them out and get rid of most of them. Keep doing what you're doing, and steem on!

Sherlock, I have a small case for you: @naveedsarwar is uploading lots of plagiarised content, and @steemcleaners is not acting fast enough. He or she has blogged two posts about an introduction, one was blatantly fake, it was a random YouTube vid of a random woman, the other was slightly more believable. I want you to investigate. I can pay you up to .200 SBD, I don't have much money :P

Here's the link to both of his "introduction" posts (earlier one is first):
https://steemit.com/first/@naveedsarwar/an-introduction-my-first-video

https://steemit.com/steemit/@naveedsarwar/hi-how-are-you-your-esteem-friends

Posting one stolen introduction after the other, ridiculous!

Anyways, the user is alreaday on @cheetah's blacklist and not making any rewards, a brief look also didn't reveal any shady connections. Nothing much to report here.

I do not accept payments! Upvotes and tips are welcome, but I am not a gun for hire!

Thanks for the lead!

No problemo :P

I just wanted to make sure.

wao! u r an awesome investigator

Good Good good !!!!! Thanks for doing this.

Hello Sherlock. As you may know...Is it possible to post every 5 minutes while the bandwidth limit is - 1xx% ? Abuse or possible ?

I am not sure I understand the question, a link would probably help.

https://steemd.com/@cryptomonitor is posting every 5 minutes while Bandwidth Remaining is currently -60%. Just wondering how this is possible...

While the bandwidth displayed is likely just a problem caused by steemd using the "old" calculation from 0.19.0 not 0.19.1 (see https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases), this account still raises a bunch of flags!

The spam-posting in itself is worrying, but the voting on it looks especially fishy.

I will look into this further!

I tried to contact you yesterday via steemit.chat. Are you there from time to time ?

yes, and I saw your message, haven't had time to respond yet.

You've got the Midas touch.

keep up with the hard work dude! I don't know how you find these things but we all are grateful that you do! And your writing style is just the incredible too!

I actually chuckled while reading this.
rolls eyes
The force of stupid is strong with this one

Good, it was meant to entertain, too!

@alao got you a $1.55 @minnowbooster upgoat, nice!
@alao got you a $1.55 @minnowbooster upgoat, nice! (Image: pixabay.com)


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