Yes, that's 10k, 10000 dollars... @booster, @fyrstikken, (and anyone that cares about steemit being abused) you might wanna pay attention to this... As seemingly after a month of ongoing abuse of your voting bot, more specificly your frontrunner guild, it is still in the process of being abused. And heavily so!
Along this post I will be exposing the #1 Abuser and how he/she has managed to take an estimated 10k dollars in a month's time.
Many different users have taken advantage of this abuse, myself included. To be fair, I did it to a minium and lost some money in the course as well, due to the bot itself being bugged and giving me half of its votes when used legitimately. This also being the reason I whasn't sure whether to make this post in the first place. Anyways, this thing is getting pretty ridiculous, to the point where its right in hindsight... Just a single look at the transactions being sent in, and the obvious is to be noticed instantaneously.
Let's start shall we
So to start with the obvious, take a look at some of these recent transactions being sent in towards @booster.
@Booster is a bot with a current vote value worth circa. 188$. This means sending in a 100+ SBD transaction for a vote would be far above the chance of gaining a profitable ROI (return on investment). There might be someone crazy enough to do so, but 3 different persons in a matter of less than a minute of one another... that means something is off.
The second thing is the fact that the transactions get sent back.
- sumayia transfer 140 SBD to booster https://steemit.com/@jakiasultana/family-quoto-1513718365-674329
- booster transfer 140 SBD to sumayia Unable to accept bid. (ID:31f64baf48c50373300580e235d8c866bc31f103)
Go ahead and take a look at the post, which at the time of posting this is at 70 dollars of vote value. Currently this is one of the highest vote-values gainable (total pool), and basicly gotten for free by using the abuse. With that being said, it used to be almost double of that.
How the abuse works
Don't worry, it can't be abused any more than it already is. So explaining in detail how it works won't make it any worse. And hopefully this way it will be looked at and understood by the owner, @fyrstikken.
The @booster bot has a frontrunner guild tide to it, which has the purpose of giving pre-accumulated votes from users who signed up for it. So that once the bot itself starts voting they get curation rewards for it. This pre-voting is also one of the things that made the service so profitable for its users. Sadly, this abuse is now taking those votes away towards the abusers, and away from its legitimate customers.
In time the abuse seemed to have slightly changed, it used to screw up @booster's votes in some occasions, giving just half of its vote power in a cyclus (so instead of 100%, 50%). This however doesn't seem to be the case anymore as of now. I have noticed some more changes, which if requested so I could go into more detail about. For now lets stick with how it currently works.
Step by step this is how it works
- Wait for booster to start upvoting, once it starts voting (and as long as its in its voting cyclus), send in sbd/steem
- Get refunded due to @booster not being able to handle transactions while voting
- Be the highest bidder in the period of time (voting cyclus), and get "rewarded" by the frontrunner guild
It's as simple as that. Second or third place might still get votes, but fairly less compared to the highest bidder. Again, this used to work slighty different when I first encountered the bug, as along time the abuse seemed to have changed somewhat. During so Iv'e seen some of the greatest frontrunners being drained rather quickly. The biggest ones being @done and @bcc, giving combined votes of almost the current reward pool of 70 dollars. But they at last seemed to have noticed and left the frontrunner guild.
Now let me introduce you to the most nifty abuser of the month! (congrats to you?)
@sumayia or @bright-side, @arnobtogor25, @antor, @antor143, @rihadkhan, @mrpabel, @jakariashikder, @jakiasultana, @zakariashikder, @hasibur, @promita, @photographer2, @sorgo
Yes, I suspect all of these accounts to be of one and the same person. I likely still missed a few. Honestly it's hard to keep track... Just check the transactions between the accounts going forth and back from one another. Which most likely is done so to avoid suspicion in case one gets noticed.
As this person has at least 15+ accounts, it's also very hard to predict how much abuse has precisely been done by this user. But seeing as how high the rewards have been in the last month with @booster alone, combined with the current Steem dollar being so high, it's safe to assume a sum of 10.000 dollars this month is a solid estimate.
A lucrative business one could say...
you certainly seem to like to use he word abuse
Make it a drinking game ;)
excellent idea.
anytime someone says the word "abuse" ..everyone downs a shot..
I'm not sure there is any way I could survive that many shots. But I'm down!
@droucil, some of the people you have accused of abuse are innocent bystanders of how @booster protects against bluff bidding, which is currently still a work in progress.
You mean the 15 names at the end? They were all sending Steem/SBDs to one another, indirectly connecting. In case you ment the names on the first picture shown, to clarify, that picture was used to show how the high transactions stand out to the rest. You do realize this thing has been going on for a month now? Tens of thousands of dollars have been taken (exploited) from the frontrunner guild by now...
That's an exaggeration.
Far from... The first weeks of the abuse the highest reward was 130-140 dollars (payout) a single person could gain from one voting cyclus. Counting in the fact that the Steem dollar has been over 10+ actual dollars, with 10 cycluses a day (minus curation rewards), that's an easy 5000+ dollars a day... If anything it's an under-exaggeration.
OK, now I understand what is going on, thanks @droucil. I got so much missleaded by those massive upvotes on a shitty posts.
In fact I was totally forgotten that I have some rather long time ago registered my posting pass to @booster. In general , if all would work as intended - this bot service could be there without much damage to the steemit system. Who would sacrifice hundreds and hundreds of SBD to get probably less than that in return ? But now, once this bug is explored, there is a huge temptation to get dozens and hundreds $$$ worth of upvotes, virtually for FREE.
We must think and act hard, in order to STOP this abuse.
At least advice the wealthy dolphins and whales how their voting power is wasted against totally useless, shitty posts.
Lets act together !
I have resteemed your post, and going to make my own post soon on this serious problem by our favorite blogging platform
Ultimately there is only one person who can fix this, and that's the owner of @booster. So lets just hope he gets eyes on this and does something about it...
I have fixed my part in just a minutes. By a new password.
Never ever again my SP will be used for upvoting those silly meme's and other shitty posts. ( there been even some in Korean alphabet, where I could not read even one word)
Well people can post what they like. Some people may find it more intresting than others. I thought this platform was made for the common folk.
I see you are still hunting down the steemit abusers. It's very addictive, I followed some of those voting farmers for a while as well, when you mentioned that many of my commenters were farming commenting votes and doing nothing of value for steemit.
Good job!
It kind of came across my path ;) I rather not focus on stuff like this too often though, it eats me up when I start focusing on all the "bad" things.
Same with me (hugs) <3
Thank you for reporting this and bringing it to everyone's attention.
I'm mentioning your article in my up-coming piece about the upcoming battle ahead of our community if we wanna stick it out and rise to our rightful position in the world
Hope you'll check it out when it's out later today ;)
Great piece and following for more cutting edge reporting on the platform's health and other cool topics
Peace man
It's sad to say, because a dim view of humanity, but there have always been people who are willing to take advantage of a system, any system, to profit themselves, even at the expense of others. The scary part is that this could get far worse if Steemit begins to see exponential growth. Sure there are groups and individuals who are doing a wonderful job finding and stopping spam and the like, but immense growth in the user base could easily swamp them. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's good to see people like yourself at least trying to keep the abuses in check.
Wow... nice piece of investigative work-- well done! It's pretty disgraceful what these people are doing. I am not even sure whose "department" this is, since it's basically someone exploiting a loophole in a service and getting something for nothing. Did you message @fyrstikken directly about this?
This seems to be some combination of spam and fraud and possibly "post farming"... @patrice, do you want to look at this one?
I would say it's the responsibility of the owner of @booster in this case, as it's his bot being exploited. I haven't had any contact with @fyrstikken, if you could send him a message with a link to this post for his eyes to see it would be appreciated.
Great detective work @droucil! The conclusion is that a bot should not have a front runner guild I suppose.
I believe it has always worked correctly till they changed the script into accepting Steem as well, but I can't confirm this for sure. For now I would agree that it should be turned off till it's fixed.
thanks for shedding light on this. hopefully it'll get fixed so that our community can thrive
There will always be people without scruples or values, grandparents always say money does not make happiness, and those people in one way or another pay in this life. Very good your information and luck. You have soul of journalist haha
i am frustrated because i am not clear about the bot....i just asked you an easy and simple question that is bot using is perfect for my content???
i like abuse steemit abuse is the best community scam
This is the MVP comment of the year. 🔥🔥🔥
Upvoting this because this is the true solution to all of Steemit's problems.
Is users like this that give me hope for the future of the platform 👀
This is eye opening. Thanks for exposing these guys who want to make this platform unattractive for us
wow nice,,,, your shearing
in my point of view it's everyone own choice to decide what to do and what not. If you are waiting for bots to give you upvotes and followers and pay for that service while you haven't done a research first then i will be harsh and say serves you right. Ofc someone gonna debate this with the argument i pay for a service and that service isn't provided back to me and i will reply again you got what you deserved
Why in first place you all try to find the easy way? ( that's not something personal i am talking in general and i hope to reach the new steemit users checking this, i don't even know you to be exact :P ) You need more followers and more money?
Then the answer is make quality posts and go interact with others. comment them, so them that you read their posts or at least most of it and get to know them better. Also try reach them in the chat and talk, it may be harder but longer term it will be more valuable and after that you gain so much people following and cant check all their posts, at the ones you deem that worth you can use an autovoter
Personally i haven't paid a single $ for an upvote bot and obviously never used one and never will, i prefer to read what i upvote as i did now so whether he is a scammer or not the final click it's everyone's own choice and if the scam is or will be that huge i bet someone will put an end to it!
I wanna clarify again that i haven't choose any side in this and just stated my opinion instead of a ''good post'' :P
I wonder if you read my post at all... Since this is clearly not about the use of vote-bots. An abuse has been found with a vote-bot, yes. But it's about the fact that tens of thousands of dollars have been claimed for spam posts without any consent. Simply put, there has never really been paid for those votes.
Thank you for outing this.
i actually read it. Basically what you said it that one person with multiple accounts took advantage of the bot and earned way too much money. I on the other hand took the chance to talk generally about the specific bot that these days many contradictory posts are made. The relation in this is the ''easy money'' once again as i mentioned. Most of the people paying for the service believe they will earn easy money and followers while at the same time someone took advantage of something that found out or thought for ''easy money'' again. In other words trying to make easy money out of everything leads nowhere
It looks to me you do not understand the problem at all, @filotasriza3 . We are not talking about bots or buying upvotes.
We talk about someone launching a buggy bot, which is depleting the reward pool in favor of a useless shitty post publishers, who do not even have to buy anything, not paying anything at all. And the bot owner does not care about this at all.
The valid question is only one - who brings more damage to the system? SHIT POSTERS, SP delegators or buggy bot owners? Or all of them in equal degree?
and what's the main root of all these questions and the possible answers? easy money, everything starts from there. i get that the buying upvotes and the usage of bots isn't the issue here and i clarified it, i just wanted to include this to state once again where everything starts and why. I can't understand how an obvious question like this is the only valid one and the answer is none of the above. Everything you mentioned harm the steemit community but depending the case today a shity poster may harm more than a buggy bot owner and tomorrow vise versa. The real question should be what we gonna do to erase these behaviors and a possible answer is mentioned in my first comment that is out of subject but i really appreciate we have a dialog and you replied instead of just swear or don't say anything at all
@filotasriza3, you could be Mark Twain or Ansel Adams and your content will never go anywhere here. Your amazing post or story will go nowhere in the trending section because it's riddled with Whales having a circle jerk voting on each other's content. It's why I see pictures of concrete walls with some taken from some random children's book with massive $300 SBD upvote.
@adonisabril i don't think i shown any signs that i disagree with what you are saying and i can add that in trending section not only you can see what you mentioned but posts that nobody read with a bunch of upvotes from people who gave their posting keys just for the curations and the ''circle'' if you wanna talk more about me send me at steemitchat i think it's tiresome to keep typing here as the only one who can bring a solution to the post's matter is the owner of booster
This post has received gratitude of 10.05 % from @appreciator thanks to: @droucil.
wow...blassst on steemit
good job thanks
You work is great for making steemit platform clean from abusers.
such a blog is so helpful to all steem user because it inform about steem
I agree with you blog very useful!I am against such bots.
I agree with u. I want to say thanks for vote my last post, i aoreciate a lot. Thxxx
Hey your post is really informative and expose all these abusers and I can see how they had grown their capital so fast and our system must do something for it.
i used such a way of getting ups but I stopped it. All this bos are programmed fine and they always keep their profit much more than we think. I sopped to pay for upvotes anybody...don't know maybe thos strategy is wrong..
Fairly simple fix...
I still don't understand much like what's the difference in SBD, Steem power anyone here care to explain..?
Great work, oddly enough I was just waiting for my VP to go up to make it work joining, now I probably won't bother!
This person is playing games if he is the one with all these accounts.
Isn't it wonderful that in a transparent, decentralised blockchain all the fraud and abuse is there to seen and be exposed. As bad as it is, at least the data is there for us to know vs what we don't know behind big banks.
Very nice post. Inspite of so many difficulties and contradiction but steemit.com still great . Together we try to make building greatest steem community.
Have a great New year to everyone here.
right.....
you are great post...
l like your post...
Thanks for highlighting this. He has been reported to steemcleaners as well so hopefully something gets done about this.
What you raise is a legitimate concern.
But here's another issue/question. Frontrunner guilds are a way to game the system as well. One of the ways someone had noted a witness could manipulate the blockchain is to accomplish exactly what these guilds are doing.
Makes you wonder at what point it becomes illegitimate.
Wow amazing! great job, keep it up.
please edit that "upvote me I am new on steemit" please remove that part and you will actually receive some money, instead of flags :D dont worry if u get flagged just make new posts, just remember u can always make new posts!
just never ask for upvotes! Imagine if everyone sked for upvotes just because they are new! there would be so much upvote asking spam everywhere!
Don't do this, this is considered spam.
Please read this: https://steemit.com/steemit/@miti/newcomers-minnows-and-spammers-this-post-will-save-your-reputation
Maybe ask nicer lol just kidding its spam.