This is why we can't ever have nice things.
About a month ago, the user @fabien released a bot to help the community known as @promoted. The purpose of this bot was simple: It would up vote you every time you promoted your post. It was a really nice initiative that was aimed at promoting the use of promotion (Yea I said it). Unfortunately we had some hungry, selfish minnows that didn't want to help their entire colony grow but rather exploit the generosity of this platform and steal the profits while affecting the earnings of genuine and hard-working bloggers. @fabien @promoted I would like to request that if possible, all of these users be unvoted/downvoted again to remove those rewards? I will be explaining exactly how a specific group of users exploited the shit out of the reward pool and are still at large.
As I said before, the bot @promoted was supposed to upvote you every time you promoted your post. Unfortunately the creator added a condition in which even promoting your post with 0.01 SBD would make it liable for an upvote by this bot (This has been patched now). @fabien did this because he genuinely wanted to help the people. I don't think even he knew that people would take advantage of something as generous as that....
Each upvote by that bot got the user 0.09 SBD. Now assuming the user got this upvote after 30 minutes, that would still get the user about 0.035 SBD and 0.03 SP for every post. A pretty neat profit right? Unfortunately some people realized this and decided to exploit this by spamming the blockchain with plagiarized content and useless comments and getting them all upvoted by this bot.
Below is a list of just a few users accused of commiting this crime. I have also gone ahead and taken pictures to prove some of them guilty just so you get an idea of how badly these people exploited this bot:
anikearn
astrotv
bitatlas
bradfordtennyson
brentian
cookingstar
csdfds
enjar
funcore
howtodo
infokrieg
kingjan
kittentown
krishatnet
mostafa1983
neoradio38
news24
newsfront
nx440
ophelion
politik
poweredbyweb
prepper
rathin
secrettv
seveaux
spiderlee
surprisebit
theflood
topzehn
videobooster
vigux
wissenschaft
rexx - linked to the account hrsagar
videobooster - linked to the account steemshiro
I would like to point out that all the rewards for these people from all of this exploitation will be due in 2 days (You will see that in a minute) and I would like to request any and all whales who take care of the spammers and scammers in this community to look into these guys. I noticed that @sadkitten / @personz took care of 2 of the accounts (which I haven't added on the list) so hopefully he/she can take care of these spammers and scammers as well.
I will try my best to get a list of all the comments/posts that were upvoted by these users in a different post. However, I do not have the tools to do this efficiently :/
I will be posting the proof on a few of these users one by one:
1.) neoradio38 - Spam and plagiarized posts
Hi. I took the time to look through all the accounts here an I'm sorry but most of them are normal users with either normal posts, some of them poor quality, and some plagiarized or just reposting videos or images - with the following exceptions:
Spam comments: kingjan, news24, topzehn
Spam posts: neoradio38, theflood
However the @sadkitten project looks more at spam bot net farming, so this wouldn't really qualify for that project. I think @steemcleaners would be more interested. You can drop links in https://steemit.chat for these.
Yes I'm a minnow. No I'm not guilty of what your talking about on this post. But I would like to know how I can send bots steem. My account says I have 5.92 Steem Power but I have 0 Steem. Do I need to buy steem. I click on power down and it says powering down but nothing happens. If I power down would that hurt me any way?
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by block-police from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews/crimsonclad, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.