Taking down the Oneko Spam Farm
Abuse Category
Spam, Faucet Delegation Abuse
Merged Pull Request
https://github.com/steemit/redeemer-irredeemables/pull/37
TL;DR
Over 300 hundred spam accounts identified and submitted a pull request to have their Steemit Inc free delegation removed.
What is faucet delegation?
When you create an account through steemit.com, you are given roughly 15 Steem Power worth of delegation by Steemit Inc.
This delegation is temporary to help bootstrap new users. The purpose of the 15 SP delegation is not to give a user voting power but to give them bandwidth so they transact on the Steem blockchain until they earn or buy their own Steem.
What is faucet delegation abuse?
When a user creates multiple user accounts through the Steemit Inc sign up process to trail vote or flag.
Steemit Defense League is one I have reported about in the past. There are even larger groups with thousands of accounts doing this.
Introducing the @oneko spam farm
While doing some anti-abuse research, I came across a group of accounts posting single images and getting hundreds of votes.
I noticed hundreds of accounts funneling money into this account. This is a network that has been farming for a very long time.
It was clear this was the hub of a large spam network, but at this point I didn't know large.
After a few hours of research, I came up with 301 accounts tied to this network.
While the total sum of the votes was very low, it was using hundreds of accounts powered by free Steemit Inc delegation.
The other accounts followed the same pattern, posting a single image, but these posts had hundreds of votes abusing Steemit Inc free delegation.
They were immediately added to the Global Blacklist API via the @buildawhale Blacklist. I created a pull request for the Redeemer-Irredeemables to remove Steemit Inc delegation.
Once the pull request was approved, the delegation was removed over the next 24 hours.
Hey @themarkymark,
Thank you for contributing to the Anti Abuse Initiative.
The faucet delegation abuse you cover in this post is quite a big issue thinking of the thousands of accounts which have used and misused this power. It's good to see that users do some research on it and use the offered possibility with Redeemer to get the delegations removed.
I liked it that you explained the terms faucet delegation and faucet delegation abuse even though it was quite short. Giving more insight in the whole process could also motivate other users to try it.
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Thank you for your review, @naturicia! Keep up the good work!
Well done, @themarkymark! Your work during and since HF20 has already won back my witness vote. This simply seals the deal. 🖒
GOOD!!!
THANK YOU for taking on this task
it's one of the reasons why we strongly recommend you as a witness!
Good work.... i think the true extent of spam and fuckery going on on steemit is larger than we realize at this point
My account appears pretty popular thanks to the hardfork. Hundreds of those or similar spam bots all followed me before the fork, and now they don't have enough resourse credits to unfollow me!
Thanks for getting rid of their delegations! I believe Steem will survive the crypto apocalypse because there are so many people who truly care and don't give up hope when the price crashes.
Wow I’m always amazed at the effort some people will go through to scam the system! Glad you found it and put a stop to it
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Hi @themarkymark!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 8.034 which ranks you at #28 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has not changed in the last three days.
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 213 contributions, your post is ranked at #15.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
This is why I support you for a witness and tell everyone I know to do the same. Thanks for all you do @themarkymark!
Good job! I think these guys must be swearing once they see that all of their 'hard work' went up in smoke.
Found an interesting feature/bug that has helped reveal a multi-account user with their sights on my account, @themarkymark.
When editting an eight month old post (although it did not appear as new on the feed(s)) it triggered something for me to suddenly get about 25 100% upvotes all at once. It does not sound malicious.... just a weird bug since post payout editting is now possible.
If you would like a list of those accounts there are screen captures on my phone, via esteem, which has them all.
An edit and a new post look exactly the same on the blockchain.
Ah, that would explain it!