Some of you might remember my article about @dart.
According to my research, he operated a botnetwork of more than 8,000 bots and took in about 35,000 USD. He let the bots post simple Youtube links, or other spam posts and then upvotet himself with hundreds of other bots. This resulted in high revenues, which were passed on to bittrex.
As I found out from @patrice, the botnetwork had a lot more accounts and thus higher revenues. She tries to fight this spam with the accounts @spaminator and @mack-bot, but this is difficult to do.
If you would like to read more about this, you can read the article here and have a look at the names of the bots here, here and here.
PowerDown process of 54 accounts
What I didn't mention, however, is another account from the network, which has absorbed a lot of money from another system.
I noticed this one when I fell into nostalgia and checked again if @dart is continuing its activity. This is not the case, however, an interesting activity can be noted.
54 accounts are currently powering their SP down from themselves to @dart.
During the last round 82.17 STEEM was transferred to @dart.
Part of it has already been transferred to bittrex. However, a significant amount of STEEM has also flowed to an account, which I would like to discuss in more detail below.
Functionality of the account @tard
The account is based on STEEM Power and delegations.
He transforms this STEEM Power into SBD using the Minnowbooster service.
You register with Minnowbooster and allow the service to use our account for upvotes with other players. In return, you get a share of the income from Minnowbooster, which sells the upvotes.
This is exactly how @tard did it.
He has registered with Minnowbooster and provided the account for the sale of upvotes.
If he had delegated instead to a bidbot like @boomerang, he would not have profited from his delegation, because delegations cannot be delegated further.
In this way @tard has had 981,375 SBDs credited by Minnowbooster in the last four months. According to the current SBD to USD exchange rate, this corresponds to a value of 3.525 USD.
Sources of STEEM Power from @tard
A few thousand STEEM were transferred from bittrex to the @tard account.
However, only a small fraction of it was powered up.
Another source of income for STEEM Power was his own spam comments and curation rewards, for which he received more than 1,000 STEEM Power.
However, most of its STEEM Power is delegated and adds up to 4,743,376 STEEM Power. This does not come from a few accounts, but from a large number of accounts.
In total there are 2,614 accounts delegating, of which the majority delegates 0.002 MVESTS. That is roughly equivalent to a delegation from one SP.
The complete list of accounts delegations have assigned to @tard can be found here.
Spam comments from @tard
The method of @tard to earn his STEEM Power with comments resembles that of GrumpyCat (->Print money against the bots).
Both were generated by spam comments and mutual upvotes with two accounts.
The @tard account consists of several posts with hundreds of comments.
The picture shows only a short section of it.
With this kind of comments, the accounts @malinin and @tard have generated large amounts of money.
This Reward Pool Abuse dates back several months. However, @malinin has currently assigned the largest delegation to @tard, amounting to 0.384 MVESTS.
Problem of delegations
The delegations come from already known accounts. These accounts were also included in my list of the accounts of @dart.
That's were the problem starts, because currently "only" 2.614 accounts have delegated to @tard. However, the number of actual accounts that are able to delegate is over 10,000.
It cannot therefore be ruled out that further incoming delegations will arrive there and thus increase the revenue from Minnowbooster.
There is a possibility that a delegation of all other accounts could double the STEEM power of @tard.
In this case flags don't work, because @tard only upvotes what others pay for. Flagging would therefore not hit @tard, but only users of Minnowbooster,
The only way I can think of is to blacklist @tard on Minnowbooster and similar services like @smartmarket / @smartsteem to prevent a change to another service.
For those interested, here is a list of all the posts concerning @dart and @tard:
35,000 $ mit über 8,000 Bots | Steemit Analyse von @dart | Ein Kommentar von @naturicia | Deutsch
35,000 $ with over 8,000 Bots | Steemit Analysis of @dart | comment by @naturicia | English
8,173 Bots von @dart | Alle Namen / 8,173 Bots of @dart | All names Part 1/3
8,173 Bots von @dart | Alle Namen / 8,173 Bots of @dart | All names Part 2/3
8,173 Bots von @dart | Alle Namen / 8,173 Bots of @dart | All names Part 3/3
4 Monate, über 2,600 Accounts und fast 1,000 SBD | Eine Steemit Analyse von @tard | Kommentar von @naturicia | Deutsch
4 Months, about 2,600 accounts and nearly 1,000 SBD | A steemit analysis of @tard | comment by @naturicia | English
Alle Accountnamen zu @tard und @dart | All account names to @tard und @dart