Today (July 20th) on Microworkers somebody is paying people to create 25 new Steemit accounts and turn over the login information for those accounts. The job description says "You wont be able to recover your account forever, I will own it. " Somebody is making a bot army. Well actually, somebody is trying to build on an already existing bot army.
As some of you might know, I wrote an article about a similar situation recently where I provided evidence that the Steemit "Defense League", an abusive individual who has created an army of accounts to downvote people they disagree with (or even just random people) was using Microworkers to pay people to turnover their Steemit account information in order to build a bot army. Microworkers is a site where people can get paid small amounts for doing short tasks online. I have used it for about a year now. Check out my first article here: https://steemit.com/abuse/@pirateofthedtube/exposing-the-steemit-defense-league-bought-accounts-on-microworkers-w-screenshot
But just today I found a whole new campaign has been set up - by the same Microworkers user as last time - to create/gain control of 25 new Steemit accounts. Screenshot below. Please note the username and the date, which I have circled. Some parts of the screen are redacted to avoid giving out unnecessary information.
This user is the same as the one who made the 70+ accounts I talked about in my previous article. See that article for screenshots of their last job where they got 70+ accounts. Here is their information available on Microworkers.
As I pointed out previously, Steemit "Defense" League accounts are known to resteem articles in South Asian languages, and this person is from a South Asian country. Given that it is the same user, who unfortunately has been able to complete this campaign and get 25 accounts, we can now be confident that the "Defense" League has over 100 total accounts. It is a disaster, and potentially an existential threat, for Steemit to have people running around with that many accounts and abusing the system.
So how do we stop this? We need to email and complain to Microworkers directly. They care about their reputation, and I believe that they probably do not realize how harmful it is to Steemit to allow this behavior. The person who created the campaign was also smart enough to label it as "new accounts", rather than telling people to turn over their active accounts. This exploits a loophole in Microworkers' rules where they do not allow people to pay other people to turn over used accounts, but technically the rules say nothing about making new accounts for somebody. Of course, many people may have completed this task without actually making new accounts, and they may have simply turned over their old ones. Microworkers wouldn't know. The only way to solve this is to mount a campaign to pressure Microworkers to specifically stop allowing this type of task.
The last thing we need is more people running around with dozens, or hundreds, of accounts.
For those unfamiliar with the Steemit "Defense" League, here are some great articles exposing their actions: Great articles on this include the following:
@mikepm74 https://steemit.com/abuse/@mikepm74/steemit-defence-league-you-have-my-attention-so-now-what
@themarkymark https://steemit.com/abuse/@themarkymark/steemit-defense-league-is-dead
@guiltyparties https://steemit.com/flag/@guiltyparties/the-flag-ring
and @berniesanders ' perhaps less in-depth, but short and sweet, "fuck you" to the Steemit Defense League https://steemit.com/steem/@berniesanders/steemit-defence-league-is-a-fucking-joke
As I asked last time I wrote on this subject: I am a smaller account, so downvotes from Steemit "Defense" League, even if they are worth very little, are a real danger to me. Therefore, I ask that people upvote this post if you found it interesting or useful. That is more out of protection than anything else. I assume I will be targeted for this post. Also, it is great if people share this information, link, and screenshot, but please link to this article if you do.
I hope this goes some way toward exposing just how sad this effort to rip apart Steemit really is. In this case, since these accounts have changed hands over the last few days at the latest (and some of them within hours of me writing this article), I hope that those who have influence in our community can use this information to somehow identify these accounts and prevent them from being usable. If nothing else, Steemit needs to have a talk with Microworkers.