I hadn't planned upon writing Episode 2 quite so soon after Episode 1 but having spent all morning investigating and watching this shit, I wanted to share it with you before I forget anything!
The Priest and The Contest-Monkey
It's with these 2 that I'd planned to analyse today - simply watching their activities follow on from each other, further confirming yesterday's theory that they're the same person.
This time, only The Contest-Monkey was active at 1am - not doing much, just setting their notifications as read.
Activity started at around 5am. The Priest isn't one for getting a good night's sleep - time is money after all and time asleep is time that could be spent entering a contest with another profile. So an early start, The Contest-Monkey setting their notifications as read again before The Priest gets to work on a few votes and then awarding prizes for one of their contests.
I love it when The Priest announces contest results - it gives me 3 more users to investigate and this is when my plan for the day went sideways. But before going into detail, The Priest and The Content-Monkey worked hard until 9am when they both disappeared until after lunch. The Contest-Monkey entering another contest and both users desperate to set their notifications as "Read" as frequently as possible.
Lunch time was fun too. The Priest wrote another post and after a pause in activity, I predicted that The Contest-Monkey would "set as read" before they take a break. It's a great feeling when you can predict when a user you suspect of scamming will do something and get it right. It helps to confirm in your mind that you're not barking up the wrong tree.
👇 Image Edited from Source in Photoshop
The rest of the afternoon was dominated by The Priest. They entered another contest and then signed off by setting their notifications as Read. Obviously setting The Content-Monkey's as Read straight after and ensuring that The Content-Monkey thanks The Accountant for their contest prize...
Content-Monkey Wins a Prize!
It feels a little bit backward to celebrate Contest-Monkey winning a prize, awarded by The Accountant without introducing our new character. So I'll jump back to the point at which I said:
...this is when my plan for the day went sideways
The Accountant
When The Priest announced his winners, I already knew that 2nd place is the one that they like to use for their own accounts so this is where I started. I obviously looked into all 3, but the 2nd place winner gave me an instant hit and a name that I recognised. They'd Achieved Level 2 on my consolidated list of plagiarists, are an admin or moderator in 5 communities (just 1 of them in Tier 1 booming) and a Community Curator. So a slightly dodgy history but has clearly made good to reach a level of privilege and trust with the Steemit team.
And whilst we're on the Plagiarism topic, it appears that they were recently caught plagiarising a Hive contest which, let's be honest about it, would have been genius had they not been caught. A contest that they didn't need any brain power to create but more importantly, entries from honest Hive users that their fake profiles can enter with on Steemit.
For them, it's a shame they were too lazy to change enough of the content and was flagged as 40% plagiarised.
They are also the user that introduced The Priest to Steemit.
The Accountant became a person of interest due to their wallet sharing with the 2nd place prize winner. A genuine looking profile that I probably wouldn't have investigated further but something about the images seemed strange. The "selfies" would be used in multiple posts. As though the person writing the post didn't have a huge library of images so had to get the most out of what they have. And then the key to these scams - along with the constant scamming of the Newcomers' Community became incredibly obvious - they stay in touch with the people whose photos they've taken so that they can be sent occasional photos. The filenames gave it away. Those key letters in the image names - "WA".
A closer look at The Accountant and they're running multiple profiles. I won't give them all names because it's an identical model to The Priest. I've even established the order in which they cycle through the profiles. Setting "As Read", entering contests and thanking for comments, votes and prizes.
My favourite of the profiles though is one which entered a contest saying that their wedding day was one of the most memorable in their life and I quote "...that moment is special to me because each time I took a look at the album..." Strange that they used a stock wedding photo and when quizzed on why commented "Yes ma, i should have [used my own photos], but lost my previous phone."... 🤔 ... but what about the album??
The Accountant does of course run their own contests and as luck would have it, the winners were announced today too.
CORRECTION: The winners were announced a couple of days ago but the post was edited today which drew my attention to it.
Back Full Circle
2nd place goes to.... The Contest-Monkey.
After wasting most of my day figuring all of this out, it is clear that The Priest and The Accountant have devised this ingenious scam and are working together.
- They're both in positions of responsibility and are both entering as many contests, Steemit Engagement Challenges and receiving booming and steemcurator votes as they can possibly get away with.
- They can get images of real people sent to them via WhatsApp (presumably for a price), creating the illusion of real diary game posts to accompany the contest entries.
I also suspect there's another user involved too - also in a position of power that I've previously caught for plagiarism. But it's also possible that they're an innocent bystander who curates and validates far too many of The Priest and The Accountant's team of parasites.
I hope that you've enjoyed Episode 2. The Accountant probably deserves their own mini-series and it's a miracle that they've still got so much responsibility and support, considering the amount of shit that's already stuck to them.
On some level though, it's genius and if it wasn't for the timeline of activity, there would be absolutely no hope of proving it. And once this mistake is corrected in their next scammer iteration, you won't be able to trust anybody.
We're not far off this already - The Newcomer Achievement Programme cannot prevent this scam and I'd guess at least 70% of all Achievement 1 posts use this scam method. Contest entries and the Steemit Engagement Challenge are already being targeted as are the Community Curators. I already find it impossible to identify any genuine new users who aren't another robot doing the same things - cheat the achievement programme, join a club, burn some STEEM, enter contests. Where are the new users bringing originality and creativity?
I digress. Episode 3 Coming Soon.
