I've been watching the Steem Bot Tracker over the last week and a half and it's quite distressing to see how many people are losing money to the bots. I took a deeper look over the last 24 hours and things have gotten a lot worse!
I thought that the bots were the main problem, but I may have been wrong. They may just be the enablers.
Problem - bidders are losing money
It's not unusual to see people placing bids in the last few seconds before a bot makes an upvote. This reduces the return on investment (ROI) for everyone who's made a bid and can even result in everyone making a loss.
I wanted to see if this was the only reason why people were making losing bids or if they simply weren't aware that that they were about to make a big loss.
Here's a screenshot that I took last night of all of the bids on @booster. If you look at the times on the background, you'll see that there was still another 2 hours and 23 minutes left before bidding closed. Even at this very early stage, bidding was massively oversubscribed, giving an 87% loss after curation.
In a post I made a couple of days ago, I suggested that the bots could simply reject any further bidding at this point and return the money to their customers rather than seeing them lose out. Wouldn't that be fair?
Unfortunately, people continued to make bids, even though they were guaranteed to make huge losses. You can click on this link to see the evidence (there are 5 screenshots). In the end, everyone made an 88.78% loss after curation.
It didn't stop there!
Once the bot made the upvote, new bids came in for the next round and the whole disaster repeated itself!
With 2 hours remaining, bidders were already guaranteed a loss of 89.58% after curation. Click here for the screenshots. As you can see from the image below, I checked again 34 minutes later and losses of 91.06% after curation were guaranteed.
When I woke up this morning, I checked the current and last rounds of bidding for @booster and it was the same old story.
Are the bidders scamming?
To their credit, @booster is one of the bots that actually gives refunds for invalid bids. So I wanted to see if any of the big bidders were deliberately making invalid bids. Why would they do that? Well, I wanted to see if the big bids were going to get refunded, leaving the smaller bids to collect more of the 'reward pool' (if you can call it that). My hypothesis was that it may be possible that they could have been using a second account to make a much smaller bid which would then get a proper upvote after scaring their rivals away from bidding.
It didn't appear as though anyone was doing that with the posts that had been submitted.
However, the quality of the posts was sometimes atrocious! Yuck!
Suspicious Bids
I became suspicious when I saw people making huge bids on other people's posts, such as a bid of 170 SBD from arnobtogor25 for this junk post by jakiasultana. Then I saw that they did exactly the same thing with this post and this post by mrpabel, as well as another by jakiasultana.
Again, are the bidders scamming?
I took a look at the blog of jakiasultana and it was full of junk. Ouch - our poor blockchain! I then checked out their wallet and saw that they'd made some transfers to sumayia. So, I had a look at sumayia's wallet and saw this...
Hmm, multiple invalid bids to @booster and a transfer of 141 SBD to arnobtogor25. I decided to take a look at arnobtogor25's blog - multiple single image posts per day, usually upvoted by antor (and others) before being upvoted by bots on day 6.
arnobtogor25 made a bid of 170 SBD on a junk post by jakiasultana who made a transfer to sumaiya who made a transfer to arnobtogor25. Weird!
Do I think there's a scam here? Well, arnobtogor25 made a massive loss on a valid bid on @booster, so I think that counts as evidence that those involved may simply be victims of the bots not protecting their customers.
Other Bots
I took a few more screenshots of people making losses on @voter, @lovejuice and a particularly heavy loss of 95.67% on @msp-bidbot.
Final Thoughts
The more I look into the world of upvote bots, the worse it gets! I only took a closer look because I could see an unfair situation where people were losing money because they were directing SBD on something which doesn't guarantee a net profit. I've only scratched the surface, but I think that there's enough evidence to show that Steemian's aren't always safe.
If you want upvotes because you aren't yet well known enough to have a decent number of people see your posts, stick with @minnowsupport or one of the services that actually checks to see if your work is of good enough quality (i.e. not worthless junk), such as @qurator, @humanbot or @thehumanbot.
Remember, harm no one!