It's been about 4 months since the first 2 boosters came online. @randowhale and @booster. At first they were a pretty neat idea. Quick way to get some extra SBD. Originally the only issue was them resulting in some people that didn't really deserve it getting a higher rep fast. As time progressed more and more abuse scammers started to use them. They have become a quick way for scammers to both make money and power up accounts. Some post seemingly legit content such as memes and videos. Others just mass post copy/paste and plagiarism. Even others made mass amounts of comments and had those upvoted to try to hide what they were doing. Thankfully this last one was eliminated by some of the boosters. For a couple of weeks it became such an issue that it was impossible to counter. Here is an example of one account:
As you can see many payouts all over $4. I've seen some as high as $30 on these posts. In this case they are done by a scammer who is already on cheetah and has been for quite awhile. Here is another example of the same behavior:
Same pattern. There are many of these accounts. They are probably all owned by the same person or a group of related people. I've personally put over 2 dozen accounts that match this pattern on cheetah's blacklist. But being on cheetah doesn't fix this problem. The owners of the boosters haven't added the few lines of code it would take to prevent these people getting upvotes to their bots. This lets the scammers continue to rake in the SBD and build rep. This not only results in the scammers profiting but takes those funds away from the reward pool so they don't go to legitimate content creators. It also has the domino effect of encouraging more scammers to take up this behavior. Other people with steem power see the SBD going to the booster creators and make their own. There are now dozens of these boosters out there. @randowhale and @booster have been joined by @minnowbooster, @drotto, @minnowsupport, & @bellyrub just to name a few.
Something needs to be done by the community to ring in this abuse. We need to not only put pressure on the abusers by removing their payouts but the owners of these boosters. Get them to check who they are voting on. Get them to add protection for voting on accounts that are on @cheetah. Get them to not vote on posts that have been identified as abuse by @steemcleaners. Get them to not vote on low rep and especially 0 rep and under accounts. Get them to remove votes on posts and accounts identified as abuse.
Now the real question is how can we achieve this. Well the biggest way is being proactive and downvoting any of these posts you see that are on cheetah or have negative rep. Take away the rewards of the abuser and that takes away 2 things: The curation reward from the booster owner and the reward the abuser can use to pay for more upvotes from the booster owner. Another way is to not use them and encourage others not to use them either. The only other way I can think of is to call them out on it and put public pressure on them like I'm doing now.