The Art of Deception: The Yanik Plagiarism Ring is Still Alive.

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This time, the Jaguar team has gone deeper than ever. A series of strange coincidences has widened more and more the investigation without compromising on depth. We have discovered strange but sure connections. It may looks like a movie, many will say. And in fact, you won’t believe your eyes, because the @yanik plagiarism ring is large, it involves many persons, a lot of money, and it is active almost from the beginning of the Steem blockchain. For this reason, cleaners are needed to dismantle such organized plagiarism rings that can lead to the loss of value of the entire blockchain.

You may have heard of some connected plagiarism cases based in Ukraine.
One of these was discovered and exposed by @sherlockholmes, you can read about it in this post.

Another famous network of Ukrainian plagiarists headed by yanik-artur12089 was apparently dismantled in 2017, banning all the accounts.

Attention Please: are we sure that there is nobody left on the platform from this network composed of more than 20 profiles that exchange a considerable amount of money?

Let's investigate more deeply.

The @Yanik plagiarism network was made up of several accounts: analyzing the transfers of money on bittrex (we only analyzed that, but changelly and blocktrades were also used), it was discovered that the main bittrex addresses to which money from plagiarism was transferred were three :

57aeef97e1d440e5bcf, to which yanik transfered himself, @artur12089, @sacha, @dman57, @dasha193, @foreman, @julia-steemit, @vano, @mega.vlad, @folaut89, @makdac. The money movement of this account was close to 4,000 steems, when the value of the steem was skyrocketing. The flux of transfers was even more complex than that, for example @artur12089 contributed to another bittrex address (e55b3e5e7fdb42a7a46) to which another twenty accounts moved their money, all of them now blacklisted. I mention @krata, @klava, @viky1, but they are quite a few, and they all ended up blacklisted.

9276ce5250354b53ba7, to which @yanik, @yanik1991, @dman57, @mega.vlad and @andrianna contributed. The money transfers was 4375 SBD (with the value of the SBD exceeding $ 10). @andrianna by herself, the only one still to be present on the platform, contributed with 4046 SBD between May and August 2017.

Note: she said that before the 17th of April, 2017 she didn’t have password of her account, but all the transfers to this bittrex address, in common with yanik and other abusers were made in period between May and August 2017, when @andrianna already had control of the account

You can check all the data in steemworld.org (see the screenshot above) and read a summary in this post of @sherlockholmes.

@andrianna explains her version here but, as you can see, the cost of the account was 50$, and she transferred more than 4000$.

But let’s go further. More or less all the above accounts have been blacklisted. For example, we found an old acquaintance: @dasha193, who also had direct contacts with @yanik, as shown for example by a direct transfer dated 21/2/17, and today she has a new account.
Her user name is now @yakubenko, @dasha193 became Dashulya @yakubenko.
@dasha193 was active between 11/13/2016 and 09/22/2017, she was then blacklisted like the other plagiarists of the ring, then, on December 10th 2017 Dashulya created a profile on instagram and on December 11th the @yakubenko account on Steemit via anonsteem .

At these links you can see her wearing the same shirt in two photos of the two different lives, the first as a @dasha193 and the second as @yakubenko.

source 1
source 2

Here is the extract of the memo on bittrex, with some of the names later blacklisted related to @yanik including @Dasha193.

But it does not end here: @dasha193 also pays to another bittrex account, corresponding to memo 1d1b87dacd234a4297b. It is shared with @daio.

This is a Mind map to simplify the visualization of the connections between the accounts.

Now, let’s see the history of the @daio account, it is a little troubled: the account is opened on 18/4/2017 by someone who defines himself guy fond of photos and martial arts. A week later, @andrianna comments on his post, on 25/4/17 (and the account by @andrianna was in her own hands from 16/4/17, as she said), the same post is found to be plagiarized on 26/4/17. The account lost trustworthiness and support from steemians, except from @andrianna.

On 17/6/2017 the account passes into the hands of daio’s (he declares) sister Darlene, passionate about drawing, immediately blacklisted, and then on 4 July 2017 to Kristina.
On July 20, as @daio /Kristina, she made the first payment to aforementioned bittrex memo, shared with @dasha193.

Therefore, we have shown that between the multitude of accounts connected to the @Yanik /Artur circle of plagiarists, at least 3 are still alive on Steemit: @andrianna, @yakubenko (previously @dasha193 (blacklisted by SteemCleaners) who made direct payments to @yanik and to the bittrex account used by all the blacklisted) and @daio (previously blacklisted, which with @dasha193 shared the same bittrex).

Now, some people said that these three very attractive girls are talented artists but there’s a lack of art culture knowledge that led to failure.

We’ve demonstrated in recent posts that they repeatedly keep on plagiarizing artworks of other artists (painters and photographers) without having permission and without crediting the original sources/authors (what determines plagiarism is precisely the lack of attribution). We contacted the authors of the original artworks and several of them told us nobody contacted asking for a permission: amongst them the fashion photographer Marta Bevacqua and the artist Polina Bright.

Update on the yakubenko case : Art Paraphrasing Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement

Art Plagiarism Case #26 - Caso de Plagio Artístico #26 - @daio

And here, another case exposed:

Art Plagiarism Case #25 - Caso de Plagio Artístico #25 - @daio

What’s happened?

The Yanik ring, in effect, after all their accounts were blacklisted by SteemCleaners, wasn't able to get any more accounts, because account creation from Ukraine and Russia was halted, so they had to come up with an elaborate plan to get the steemcleaners to unban some of those accounts. So some of them invented a complicated story: the account buying fairy tale, in which they got some people to act as new fronts for the accounts.
When they were forced to change the keys (so as to not be able to pretend they didn’t have full control of the accounts) they started using anon transfers, probably to the same scammers.
What all these @Yanik accounts were doing is exactly what these people are doing now, art paraphrasing, a type of art plagiarism, and image plagiarism.
That's why all those accounts were banned.
Then they halted that for a while, and then they resumed with the same art paraphrasing.

The End (?)

We think that some of these plagiarists have a good technique for copying drawings and photos. Maybe they could be artists, if they were drawing something original, but for now we haven’t seen no original creation. The problem is the persistent confusion between ART and Hobby of drawing: these are two different things, with different values.
In Steemit, a great problem is the absence of curators able to distinguish between these two things (that we could define as artwork and handwork), mainly when the posts (for ignorance or fraud) are not inclusive of correct sources and references, so it’s necessary to spend a lot of time checking for plagiarism and copyright infringements.

When you read a book and you make a resume, you're not an author, even if you're a good narrator.

Art and the hobby of drawing are in two different areas, and all the areas should be curated and checked for plagiarism.
So, we’ll keep on doing our work to check and report abuses, because we love the Steem platform and wish it would be a place where real and talented artists are welcomed and protected from the unfair competition of art plagiarists.

This is @lagiaguara
Reporting directly from the Jungle.
Onwards!