Welcome back to another episode of "The Priest and The Contest-Monkey". It's great to have seen so many of you watch along with me and it appears that Steemit's awash with super sleuths.
Many of you have established who our protagonists are and Episode 4 will definitely confirm your suspicions if you've figured it out.
I wrote much of this post yesterday but I like to have a bit of fun along the way... so I left one of my "scammer predictions" in my comments yesterday. Once you've finished reading today's episode, have a look - I'm sure you'll find it 😀
If you're new to this story, Episode 1, Episode 2 and Episode 3 are still available on catch-up.
So let's get back to the story...
The Plagiarism Angle
One thing that I noticed across a number of these accounts, is their proficiency in trading. These people are absolute geniuses when it comes to reading charts, Relative Strength Index and Proof of Capacity.
And then it clicked - my little scamming crew might not be using appropriate hashtags but the original author might have done and then BINGO!
And that's where my multi-tag interface that I created came to the fore...
👇 My Screenshot
- The Accountant - Relative Strength Index - Crypto Academy Season 2, Week 4 (May 2021)
- Mary - Proof of Capacity - Crypto Academy Season 2, Week 5 (May 2021)
The pattern was there and there are many more examples. In yesterday's update (I wasn't planning to post so early but I got too excited), I was prepared to proudly announce that you should be looking out for a post about Trading with the MACD indicator.
But I was wrong. The next post was about trading with the SuperTrend Indicator, a topic so complicated that it needed to be split into multiple parts. "Written" by The Priest.
Update: The Accountant has now posted about the MACD indicator
Whilst my prediction would have been wrong, I was relieved. Early seasons of the Crypto Academy were awash with scammers so there were over 100 entries each. By Season 5 Week 7, there were only 50 entering.
And as luck would have it - A formula was included which yielded a single identical match in Crypto Academy Season 5, Week 7.
The Plagiarism Detector
But why didn't Google Search or a plagiarism detector pick this up? These people aren't complete fools - they apply for Community Curator roles with the knowledge of which tools should be used to check for plagiarism. I thought that they'd choose an old entry and translate it (maybe next time) but instead, they adjusted it just enough to pass the tests and included original screenshots (normally, but not always). Minimum effort - No suspicion. But they look like genius traders.
Somewhat bizarrely, this sentence was near the beginning with no previous mention:
SuperTrend indicator as I have said earlier is a trend-based indicator
and this is where the creative license comes into play. In probably the only original paragraph in the article.
The published article was copied from this post, written by a user who left the platform over a year ago.
Could they pass this off as their own work? Researched using the internet, just like the Academy Students did? Of course they could.
Is it different enough to constitute original work? The plagiarism detector doesn't detect it after all. But where are the references?
Could they claim Proof of Brain? I don't think so (I also don't think they did enough for it to constitute original work but we've all heard the arguments before).
Where's the knock-out punch?!
In their post about "Trading Crypto with Aroon Indicator", the level of dishonesty and deliberate deceit is all too transparent and any thoughts of "it's an honest mistake" can be abolished. The post concludes with:
Note: All screenshot are taken by me from the tradingview website were i perform my analysis from.
And knowing where they plagiarised this article from, why don't we do a little comparison? There are only 4 images to compare...
| Original | Liar |
|---|---|
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
Oh, he cropped out the original author.
My Fun Game
So as I mentioned before, I placed a prediction within my comments yesterday (25th May, UK Time) of what The Priest's next post would contain. Whilst I expected Part 2 to be the final episode, it appears that The Priest finds original content hard to come by so it looks like there'll be a Part 3. If we let them get that far of course.
I'd say my predictions were pretty good if not a bit too "copy and paste". The Priest wants to get away with it so I should've expected them to change the word order. If you feel like joining the fun, why not reply to my comment and we can see who gets the closest to the remaining 4 headings.
What Next?
My hope is that support for this account is pulled, immediately and permanently. It would also be prudent to remove any outstanding steemcurator votes - there are certainly enough of them. And if any of you readers are in the Steem Watcher team, it might be worth getting the hungry-griffin to remove the votes too - my understanding is that they don't like plagiarists.
In doing so, I'd like to think that the other accounts will die with them - once the steemcurator and booming support is gone, what's the point in continuing?
Episode 5 will bring everything related to The Priest together, irrespective of whether they know about this mini-series or not. Including how I stumbled across The Contest-Monkey, who led me to The Priest (I've confirmed that the wallet transactions are as I'd expected) and where we are today.
I don't want to be repetitive but an episode relating to The Accountant, Mary and the fake accounts might be in the offing too. I just fear it will be more of the same (I could just copy and paste this post, change the word order and crop some screenshots and pass it off as an original piece).
