Hello Steemians! Today I will be shifting your attention from my usual Travel and Cooking blogs to an important matter that some of you may have come across already.
Recently I faced a situation of erroneous transfer to an upvote bot by auto-typing the wrong account name of the bot using my smartphone. Now let me distract you from the subject above for a second and tell you that I do use upvote services to promote my posts, although I always try to publish quality content. As a minnow, I believe that this practice helps some beginners like myself to get attention of a larger public and not get lost in this vast Steemit ocean! Also I do appreciate and support upvote services such as @jerrybanfield which funds growth projects on Steemit such as @budgets and regularly promotes top 25 high quality posts.
Coming back to this unpleasant "situation" I had to face. While trying to make a transfer to @minnowbooster bot, I somehow entered and account name @minn and by the time I realized my mistake the funds were gone already. Now, the amount of transfer was not a huge one and, to be honest, I wasn't pretty much expecting the refund, but this pushed me to make further investigation into it. And, fellow Steemians, I came across a SHOCKING discovery:
There are tens, if not hundreds, accounts like that on Steemit that were all created starting from beginning of 2016 until the most recent ones in January 2018. All those accounts have several things in common:
Name association with (or abbreviation of) the most popular and commonly used upvote bots
Zero (and I mean literally ZERO) posting activity on those accounts
Collecting wrongly transferred funds and not a single refund made to users since existence of the account.
Regular transfers of "honestly earned" benefits to some associated accounts. I will talk on this more later on.
Reputation 25, which speaks all for itself...
Now lets's go through some of those accounts that I had time to discover during my swift inquiry this morning. I am sure you will be able to find many more of them should you have time and energy to make longer research
https://steemit.com/@app/transfers
Users by mistake (or due to technical glitch that mainly happens while making transfers from smartphones) associate it with @appreciator upvote bot. Created JUL 2016. Posting activity: Zero. Reputation: 25. Accumulated funds: 27.52 SBD. Refunds: Zero
https://steemit.com/@boost/transfers
The absolute leader that I have found so far!
Users by mistake associate it with @booster upvote bot. Created AUG 2016. Posting activity: Zero. Reputation: 25. Accumulated funds: 79.62 SBD. Refunds: Zero
https://steemit.com/@minn/transfers
Users by mistake associate it with @minnowsupport upvote bot. Created JUL 2017. Posting activity: Zero. Reputation: 25. Accumulated funds: 51.04 SBD. Refunds: Zero
Here is another one associated with the same bot:
https://steemit.com/@min/transfers
Created JUL 2017. Posting activity: Zero. Reputation: 25. Accumulated funds: 46.36 SBD + 6.66 Steem. Refunds: Zero
Now this one has a history of of transfers of its "honestly earned" benefits to account @angel. You could say "so what?" But I have found out that this @angel account is regularly receiving transfers from other pseudo-accounts like @min and guess what? Exactly the same description here: Created APR 2017. Posting activity: Zero. Reputation: 25.
I would like to stress to newcomers of Steemit that there is nothing wrong with Reputation 25. In fact, this is initial value we all get while signing-up and starting using Steemit for the very first time. But this reputation value, maintained for a long period of time, also means that there was absolutely no posting, commenting or other social activities (I suppose fundamental actions for which Steemit platform was designed) from the creation date of the account.
https://steemit.com/@jer/transfers
Users by mistake associate it with @jerrybanfield upvote services. Created JUL 2016. Posting activity: Zero. Reputation: 25. Accumulated funds: 15.5 SBD + 0.5 Steem. Refunds: Zero
And this is his elder brother:
https://steemit.com/@jerry/transfers
Well guys, I could go on and on. But don't want to take your precious time which you have already spent if your are still reading my post at this point. As I have mentioned above, you could make your own research and find many more of those scam accounts. Just use your fantasy and apply any abbreviation to well-known upvote bots out there.
Here below are some other examples and some newcomers registered in JAN 2018, ready to snatch your funds and never return...
https://steemit.com/@build/transfers mistaken with @buildawhale
https://steemit.com/@upm/transfers mistaken with @upme or @upmyvote
https://steemit.com/@boom/transfers mistaken with @boomerang
https://steemit.com/@post/transfers mistaken with @postpromoter
https://steemit.com/@all/transfers mistaken with @allaz
https://steemit.com/@rand/transfers or https://steemit.com/@ran/transfers mistaken with @randowhale
https://steemit.com/@sne/transfers mistaken with @sneaky-ninja
https://steemit.com/@bum/transfers mistaken with @bumper
Well dear Steemians, I should wind up here. Hope my article wouldn't offend anyone. I apologize in advance if some of the accounts mentioned above are genuine and not a scam. I just wanted to stress your attention to the issues you could face while upvoting your posts and be always careful, verify the account name before you click to that "transfer" button.
Have a nice morning, day, afternoon all!