Welcome back to Episode 3 of "The Priest and The Contest-Monkey" which I'm sure you'll find to be an absolute doozy. But before getting into things, I need to make a correction to Episode 2 where I said:
The Accountant does of course run their own contests and as luck would have it, the winners were announced today too.
For those trying to figure out who The Accountant is, I should correct myself in saying that the contest announcement was a couple of days earlier and that the post was simply edited at the point where I noticed.
Now where do I begin...
The Activity
After completing Episode 2, there was more activity that evening. Not a lot though - The Priest distributed a few votes before turning to The Contest-Monkey who needed to up their CSI so whacked in 14 votes to a variety of authors. The CSI's gained quite some significance in some communities to highlight "The Community Minded".
The following day was very quiet. The Priest smashed out a load of votes at another ridiculous hour (am I the only person who goes to bed at night and stays there until the following morning?) before starting in earnest at 6:30am.
One thing that I found interesting and perhaps unexpected, was how The Priest and The Accountant's activity worked in perfect harmony...
6:30am - The Priest (briefly)
7am - The Accountant (with a fresh post)
8am - The Accountant (again briefly)
It was then The Priests turn, composing and sharing another contest at 9:30.
The Priest had obviously left their home now and was checking their mobile - their only activity being the usual "Set as Read" and a few upvotes.
The Accountant was more active with another post in the late morning followed by a long stint of curation and community admin until The Priest returned home and was allowed on the computer at around 6pm.
This is where I began to realise something else - The Priest and The Accountant appear to use the same computer. Both also have access to mobile phones but the real activity - the post creation - happens on the laptop. Which makes the timelines of these 2 slightly more interesting (perhaps) or slightly less interesting. Confirmation of this was presented to me in a recent post by The Accountant - in which one of his screenshots has a recently used folder which includes the majority of The Priest's username.
Interesting to know, but we already knew that they know each other.
The Contest-Monkey didn't appear until after 9pm, with another contest entry. Does their lack of activity indicate that they know they're being watched? Or simply indicative of the fact that The Priest wasn't able to check the account until The Accountant had finished for the day?
Some Serious Doubt
It didn't feel like things were looking good. My evidence is circumstantial at best (as @moecki pointed out in Episode 2's comments) and if they know that I'm watching their activity, they'll have adapted already, resulting in a huge reduction in activity across all of the accounts. Or maybe they're genuine users and those that have worked out who The Accountant are think worse of him thanks to my vivid imagination.
What am I missing???
Introducing Mary
steemcurator02 suggested a Donkey and a Mary. Whilst the only Donkeys are the scammers making mistakes, I'll introduce a Mary. This isn't very creative of me, I know. Certainly far less creative than the Mary I'm referring to.
I found Mary when I realised that The Priest and co. seem to use a hashtag which makes little sense - presumably a repeat from a previous post whose template they keep using. I don't know. As far as I'm aware, the tag was created for the "Camping Club Steemit" community. This might just be a coincidence.
The tag though has highlighted a few more of their crew and played a role in smashing this thing out of the park.
Join us next time...
I can barely contain my excitement but I like my stories to have more than 3 episodes before the protagonists get destroyed so you'll have to wait until Episode 4 in which timelines become irrelevant.
I've always hated Shakespeare.