18,229 Accounts Abusing Their 15SP Delegation
It's been a remarkable couple of days - @coding-gorilla's script to find accounts abusing their 15 Steem Power delegation is working superbly well and the level of abuse is simply astonishing. We're still working through the data and have found 18,229 accounts so far that have made millions of upvotes.
I've heard the term "Mass Fraud" used repeatedly on this platform and although this certainly isn't the biggest fraud we've discovered from a monetary perspective, it has to be the largest with regards to volume.
@ac-cheetah visited our last friend and here is a list of the accounts that we have documented the upvoters for to reach our 18,229 number, with a link to their comments. We'll be visiting those with fewer than 10,000 upvotes in due course (yesterday's user had 2,666 so we have plenty more to do and I'll update you in due course).
The Steemit team has the list of the 18,229 upvoters and are in the process of removing their delegations
| User | Upvotes |
|---|---|
| emile75 | 28799 |
| bentacess | 27881 |
| melek09 | 26652 |
| pagy | 26592 |
| gecelerinyargici | 26196 |
| angela95 | 26144 |
| manusbaba | 26085 |
| amonis | 26031 |
| lavadan | 25764 |
| mikaelx | 25758 |
| edmond55 | 25705 |
| swweden2018 | 25699 |
| dalaran | 25651 |
| sidar | 24912 |
| ahmedhassan | 24405 |
| lucia12 | 24321 |
| gratel | 22205 |
| zayitkubar | 22139 |
| carolinaspurs | 22128 |
| jaganatbogdan | 21309 |
| mabonossif | 20368 |
| jardelchg | 19398 |
| pabloescobar77 | 18154 |
| katarinavalansa | 17469 |
| fcbarcelonasport | 17273 |
| aqfatye | 16966 |
| bursali | 16018 |
| saliha | 15217 |
| denizli | 15217 |
| suleturan | 15211 |
| simon66 | 14751 |
| hanselo | 14695 |
| yhita | 14692 |
| hakanpek | 14688 |
| kalandar | 13867 |
| mondialpo | 12194 |
| hawincavres | 10795 |
| bloggermagazin | 10340 |
| steepedia | 10337 |
Just realized... I could have had an early warning indicator if I had put the pieces together. I have a script checking numbers of operations per block, and noticed a while ago that votes per block had shot up from 10 or 11 to 29. I was wondering why.
I just restarted it, and I'm guessing that with these delegations removed, it's probably going to be closer to 11 again now. I'll remember that if I see any sudden changes in the future.
Hopefully the numbers will slowly come down - it probably takes about a day for this many delegations to get removed without crashing the system. I'll be sure to share a final total when we're all out!
After restarting yesterday, I've been seeing an average of about 11.7 votes per block. Down by almost 2/3. That was a lot of voting...
It was something else. I don't know exact numbers but it was in the region of 2.5 million votes over a 2 week period. With it being Chinese New Year, my latest list of 18,000 accounts hasn't been removed yet so I'll be interested in seeing what it comes down to once it is.
It's now running between 8 and 9 votes per block.
I found another 15,000 accounts 4 days ago 🙂
Guess that's why it has dropped to the 6 or 7 range now. I think that's about where it was last summer, when I started keeping an eye on it.
18,229 accounts x 15 SP = 273,435 SP. Nice find.
The amazing thing is that the 18,229 is far more than that. I shared another 18,150 with the Steem team over the weekend and there are still more. It's crazy how many accounts they've created and I don't understand how they've done managed to do it with the 15SP delegation. Any ideas?
No idea how they did it. I've never taken the time to look at the faucet code or understand how it works. I checked creation dates on about 40 voters. Some were created in December, some were created in October, and the others were all created in June. So, two thoughts:
Interestingly, I got the accounts from 3 different posts, and all of the accounts voting on each post were created during the same month (i.e post 1 had 10 voters from December, post 2 had 20 from June, and post 3 had 10 from October).
I'm hopeful that whatever weakness they took advantage of has been plugged but only time will tell. What I also found interesting was that the accounts they're voting on were all created in January 2018 and similar to what you say, a voting account only appears to vote for one user (presumably through fear of getting caught and "silo"ing their losses.
It's clever and although not the most profitable scam I've seen, the revenues could have increased exponentially.
I've caught a few of these voting "rings" in the past and I wonder if after chopping off one head, 3 more appeared.
Mi fingers hurt from clicking "downvote" all the time, but it was fun! Wonderful find!
@endingplagiarism wow a remarkable finding. Bravo, you are working impressively, I've just gone through all of this it is an amazing network doin scam in a proper way. such accounts should be investigated properly.