This is why we can't ever have nice things.
About a month ago, the user @fabien released a bot to help the community known as @promoted. The purpose of this bot was simple: It would up vote you every time you promoted your post. It was a really nice initiative that was aimed at promoting the use of promotion (Yea I said it). Unfortunately we had some hungry, selfish minnows that didn't want to help their entire colony grow but rather exploit the generosity of this platform and steal the profits while affecting the earnings of genuine and hard-working bloggers. @fabien @promoted I would like to request that if possible, all of these users be unvoted/downvoted again to remove those rewards? I will be explaining exactly how a specific group of users exploited the shit out of the reward pool and are still at large.
As I said before, the bot @promoted was supposed to upvote you every time you promoted your post. Unfortunately the creator added a condition in which even promoting your post with 0.01 SBD would make it liable for an upvote by this bot (This has been patched now). @fabien did this because he genuinely wanted to help the people. I don't think even he knew that people would take advantage of something as generous as that....
Each upvote by that bot got the user 0.09 SBD. Now assuming the user got this upvote after 30 minutes, that would still get the user about 0.035 SBD and 0.03 SP for every post. A pretty neat profit right? Unfortunately some people realized this and decided to exploit this by spamming the blockchain with plagiarized content and useless comments and getting them all upvoted by this bot.
Below is a list of just a few users accused of commiting this crime. I have also gone ahead and taken pictures to prove some of them guilty just so you get an idea of how badly these people exploited this bot:
anikearn
astrotv
bitatlas
bradfordtennyson
brentian
cookingstar
csdfds
enjar
funcore
howtodo
infokrieg
kingjan
kittentown
krishatnet
mostafa1983
neoradio38
news24
newsfront
nx440
ophelion
politik
poweredbyweb
prepper
rathin
secrettv
seveaux
spiderlee
surprisebit
theflood
topzehn
videobooster
vigux
wissenschaft
rexx - linked to the account hrsagar
videobooster - linked to the account steemshiro
I would like to point out that all the rewards for these people from all of this exploitation will be due in 2 days (You will see that in a minute) and I would like to request any and all whales who take care of the spammers and scammers in this community to look into these guys. I noticed that @sadkitten / @personz took care of 2 of the accounts (which I haven't added on the list) so hopefully he/she can take care of these spammers and scammers as well.
I will try my best to get a list of all the comments/posts that were upvoted by these users in a different post. However, I do not have the tools to do this efficiently :/
I will be posting the proof on a few of these users one by one:
1.) neoradio38 - Spam and plagiarized posts
2.) rexx - Promotion of spam comments. A very obvious alt account of the user hrsagar
3.) bluemist - Promotion of spam comments. This is just a small example. This user has promoted many more posts
4.) somenathsen - Promotion of spam comments
5.) hi2rajiv - Promotion of spam comments
6.) videobooster - Promotion of spam comments and posts. An obvious alt of the user steemshiro
7.) sam99 - Promotion of spam comments. WARNING. THIS USER's REWARDS WILL BE UNTOUCHABLE AFTER ABOUT 24 HOURS!
8.) mostafa1983 - Plagiarized posts. Literal copy pasting in most cases. Spammed posts all upvoted by the bot. WARNING. THIS USER's REWARDS WILL BE UNTOUCHABLE AFTER ABOUT 24 HOURS!
9.) seashow - Spam comments all upvoted by the bot. WARNING. THIS USER's REWARDS WILL BE UNTOUCHABLE AFTER ABOUT 24 HOURS!
10.) nx440 - Spam posts all upvoted by the promoted bot. WARNING. THIS USER's REWARDS WILL BE UNTOUCHABLE AFTER ABOUT 24 HOURS!
