Today Jaguar Force reveals a serious case of farming via the employment of multiple accounts that engage in ID Theft and ID Deception.
Dapp/Project Farming
Exploitative Steem Reward Farming is the general term that is used to refer to several types of malicious and exploitative actions that harm the Steem ecosystem and diminish the services and resources available for honest Steemians.
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Dapp/Project Farming is one of these Exploitative Steem Reward Farming techniques that involves the creation of multiple accounts to receive votes from dapps such as @dtube @ntopaz @tasteem or regular curation projects.
When users use dapps and get a certain level of support from them in the form of votes they eventually find a limit, for example if they post once a day all their posts are voted, but if they post more than that the vote frequency remains the same. So with the intent to extract ("farm") more rewards from the dapp votes, the user creates alternative accounts so that the curator's assumption that a different account implies a different person results in them getting double, triple or more rewards compared to the rewards that the curators of those dapps are comfortable to allocate to a single user. In short, the user finds out that for example if they post twice a day from a single account only one post gets voted per day at max. So then they turn to posting once a day from two accounts or three, circumventing the "per user vote frequency limit" that all dapps implicitly have.
Similarly, when users post under a the specific tags of curation projects, the same "per user vote frequency limit" applies.
In most cases the user just doesn't make an intro in the secondary account and passively deceives the curators by not mentioning that the accounts are alt accounts of @x account, naming the accounts thematically and filling the bios ambiguously. In other cases as the one we present today the user steals the identity of other people and actively deceives the curators into the illusion that the accounts are operated by different persons by creating fictitious names/bios.
As we have seen in our recent The Halo Effect, ID Deception & Plagiarism post, most ID Theft cases in Steem involve the theft of the identity of a young attractive woman, and this case is not an exception.
Additionally, the user in question: @adelepazani has been already detected and reported for Art Plagiarism 4 months ago.
So today in the Jaguar Restaurant we are serving a varied and complex combo of abuse that includes ID Theft/Deception as the main course, Dapp Farming as the second course and Art Plagiarism as the dessert paired with some luscious bubbling Halo Effect to facilitate the swallowing of all that.
@adelepazani creates her account on November 22, 2017. From that date to January 8th, 2018 she makes decent rewards on her posts, getting extraordinary rewards on a few of them. Here is the list of rewards per post:
Enter @adip
But around this time, apparently Adele decides that she is not getting rewarded enough, perhaps assuming her looks or her being from Iran has something to do with it, so she creates the @adip account on January 4th, 2018
Her name is initially "Bianca"
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Then "Bianca" adds a generic avatar:
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Which is this image:
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Then "Bianca" becomes "Adisa pasha"
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Then "Adisa pasha" becomes "Adip"
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Then "Adip" becomes "Adip/BiancaGrnalista" and the avatar changed to the image of a mandala and "born in Italy" added in location:
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Then the avatar is changed to a vectorized photograph of a woman:
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To give you a clue about who operates this account, lets see what the name of Adele Pazani's Pinterest account is:
https://pinterest.com/adipaint
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Yes, the name of Adele's Pinterest account is Adipaint
Enter @li-art
Around the same time, on January 8, 2018, four days after the @adip account is created, the @li-art account is created:
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A generic avatar is added to the profile:
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Another generic avatar is added:
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And on May 16, 2018 the photograph of an attractive young woman is added:
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The user then goes as far into ID Theft so as to create a personal banner with that image:
The account @li-art then holds that stolen identity for over a year, until a few days ago, when Jaguar Force detects it and reports it to Steemcleaners:
The user then and only then proceeds to change the avatar and the banner 3 days ago using an image of a painting:
The @adip account doesn't get commented by Steemcleaners, but magically changes its avatar one day ago too:
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Coincidentally also to the image of a painting:
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The Farming Results
Now, let's exemplify the farming that these accounts perform with one dapp: @dtube
Votes of @dtube for @li-art (169) votes
Votes of @dtube for @adelepazani (111 votes)
Votes of @dtube for @adip (40 votes)
As we can see, the ficticious account that engages in ID Theft and exploits the Halo Effect gets the highest vote count.
Bonus Art Plagiarism Cases 31 & 32
Post's URL / URL del post: https://steemit.com/dtube/@adip/95baa31o
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Source of the Art Plagiarism / Fuente del Plagio Artístico: https://www.deviantart.com/conbatiente/art/realism-drawings-102374889
Post's URL / URL del post: https://steemit.com/dtube/@li-art/c92f5l0v
Source of the Art Plagiarism / Fuente del Plagio Artístico: http://clipart-library.com/clipart/dc9rzBazi.htm
This is Jaguar Force,
Reporting directly from the Jungle.
Onwards!
Well met, @jaguar.force.
Such is the downside of curation in a decentralized set up. It should not have come as a surprise to us. I am certain there are those who hide their tracks well in this game of farming auto-votes.
On the surface, it may not seem like a big deal as the alts still drive up usage of the dapps. Unfortunately, this means the actual reach of these applications are much shorter. Not only are honest users robbed of their fair share, the long-term health of the platform suffers.
The last thing we want is to have a "popular" dapp to have very few unique individuals. It is the same with the entire population of Steem. What is the point of coming to a platform of supposed 1.3M users when less than 50K are real?
From this post alone, I am glad to see @dtube is taking actions based on the report. In all honesty, this is all they can do. They could invest in a team of curators/reporters to peruse for these types of abuse. But, is that practical on their end to maintain an internal quality control effort?
It would be nice if they have competent internal quality control, but that should not be expected. It is my hope that all projects would at least work with anti-abuse initiatives. I would hope various dapp teams would verify the claims and take appropriate actions.
In the cases of family and friends, I do understand that they can act in one accord. At the same time, doing shady things together screams red flags. We already know of rings of users who try to scratch each other's backs via dishonest practices.
Such is the curse of decentralization.
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[utopian-moderator]
Thank you for your review, @enforcer48! Keep up the good work!
You, anti-abuse curators, are also a farming auto-votes. Vote each other and use Utopian steems to give you the prizes. Post, comment and vote.
Nice to know that on the new VOICE you can no longer play your game.
Well, I must be the worst farmer ever then. Because I should be churning out several posts a day about this crap, but I don’t.
Very nice of you to be completely clueless.
Voice is a landing page for the EOS community who actually holds EOS. Don’t make it sound like people with no skin will have any impact on community discussions.
KYC has already been done on ONO and it was a spectacular failure when it comes to curbing undesirable behaviour.
The Dtube Curation team is comprised of people who are inherently prone to deception. We acknowledge that plagiarism occurs and accidently gets curated and have discussed this amongst the curation team. We will continue to improve our methods for spotting these accounts to avoid future upvotes.
If you are suspicious of an accounts validity please notify @heimindanger and @steeminator3000 through the #report-abuse channel on Discord.
& let's see if Dtube blocks all these people gaming the system.
We are confident that @dtube will respond accordingly.
From my experience with D-Tube, they don't care it's sharing.
it is ok to open a page for relative,family and friends, we all know there is transparency , there is an option to buy a page for 7 STEEM
so why you reported my page ?
i have some close friends and family here is steemit ,even my sisters
i don't accept what you wrote about me .
Wonderful, we take it that plagiarism and ID Theft are the family business then.
first not to forget to talk politely with other people
then i don't have to explain it to you ,
it's funny what you wrote up there .i have been invited many friends to join steemit
i have my own name on my account . by the way you need something to make content too
Thank you very much for your feedback.
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