RE: Thousands of dollars in rewards recovered to the reward pool.
¡Hello @anthonyadaavisii, nice to Steem you, and thanks for your detailed answer! (which led me to follow you, from now on :-)).
Totally agree about the sophisticated detection algorithms for scams - I see it as a shame that Witnesses (like @themarkymark) have to spend hours "manually" reviewing their bot users behaviour, to detect who are misusing it and cheating with the community...
Regarding your proposal: "If someone is caught in a massive scam ring, their reputation should be downvoted into Oblivion so other potential scammers will think twice", agreed too of course, but, if we consider this particular nuoviso case, have you seen his/her reputation? He stands at 64 (which is way more than mine, more than yours, and I guess that more than 95% of Steemians), and as far as I understand it (may be wrong, hehe) I have no means to downvote any of nuoviso's posts while I remain being of a lower reputation than him... We even cannot pretend he grabbed that reputation in a fraudulent manner, cause if you cast a glance at his profile, you'll see he's like the manager/editor of an "alternative news channel" (I haven't read enough to see if he claims to spread "anticapitalist counterinformation", but it wouldn't amaze me...), meaning he publishes on Steemit 2 to 4 videos a day, with quite of bunch of viewers and comments (mainly from the German-speaking community), and I don't detect the tiniest hint of him intending to "think twice" about carrying on with his scam.
Even more: he's somehow showing the way to other potential scammers, with a message like: "hey guys, if you wanna get the max money out of Steemit and laugh loud in the face of all honest Steemians, don't adopt a stealth or clandestine-like attitude, no, create one or two accounts, feeding them with quality contents, gaining legit audience and public praise, and only then, as a side activity, build your massive scam ring. Trust me, you'll be intouchable".