During my investigations on bigger cases, I will usually come across some small fish, too. Obvious cases, barely worth mentioning, but to keep you entertained, i will present some of them to you as "Cookie Crumbs". Maybe you'd like to continue investigating them yourself?
Accusation:
- An anonymous tip claims @markcrilley is an impersonator
- @unexplained popped up on my screen while checking vk.com links
The Findings
are straight forward! It's just too obvious with those:
@markcrilley
This is a brand new account, he hasn't even earned more than a few cents, but the faking couldn't be any more obvious!
@markcrilley claims to be the steemit account of a somewhat well know comic artist Mark Crilley. The steemit profile even links to the official Youtube account with over 2.8mio subscribers.
In his posts, though, when he's not just showing some screenshots of Mark's Youtube videos, he's simply presenting stolen artworks from other real artists (such as izo-ink on deviantart).
Possibly a case of split personality disorder, more likely, though, yet another case of plagiarism and impersonation.
Some of his resteemed accounts do look interesting as well, but nothing immediately suspect and I have some bigger fish on the leash that I need to focus on, be my guest and dig deeper on those if you find it interesting!
@unexplained
This account claims to be a blog about "Luxury & Eroticism" by model "Adelina Petrova".
The content shared on this account is just copy-pasted stuff from around the internet. The photos of our sexy model Adelina however, are quite obviously stolen!
All the images belong to an abandoned vk.com profile of a woman named "Veronika Koval".
Now, her images have been stolen before, but maybe she's actually an escort girl, because that's where you'll also find her images: Links NSFW: dosugcity.in & relaxkharkiv.com
A deeper look at vk.com, does show her images have been used multiple times on many (blocked) accounts. The [Veronika Koval profile] does look genuine, though. She posted her images over the course of several years until she suddenly stopped in 2014.
Again, be vigilante, such scams are usually executed by bulk, there may be more to be found here.
What's next?
There are some bigger fish that I am trying to catch:
- there's a network of accounts, aged up to a year, that are lining their pockets in the #aceh community.
- there's a brand new farm of 4-digit-count spam-accounts farming the reward pool.
I'll report on those soon!
yours,
Sherlock
Have you witnessed similar things yourself?
Don't just ignore it and move on... do something, orlet me know!