Case 7.1: how a spammer revealed a scammer - ft. a greedy kid telling stupid lies

sherlockholmes (60)in #steemit-police • 7 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)