ShitCoins Cheating in the NETCOINs Contest
If you haven't been Steemin' under the rock for the past couple of days you most likely heard about the NETCOINs listing contest. If you have though, I urge you to read the post about it and support STEEM with your vote. The whole community is pushing hard to get STEEM listed on NETCOINs for free but, cheaters are currently beating us in the race. That's why I would like to ask every single one of you to vote for STEEM now and repeat every 24h when the timer runs out, to assure our victory over the cheating shitcoins!
The currently first, PAC coin was a couple of places and more than 2000 behind a day and a half ago but, then in a matter of less than 48 hours, in a couple of bursts of about 500+ votes at a time, this shitcoin has managed to botnet all the way up to #1st place.
Apart from the strange bursts of votes, the main thing that made me believe PAC is a cheating shitcoin is that, all of the posts they made on this contest together (community included), didn't get as much traction and engagement as I did on my post to promote the contest. Not to mention that all of their posts together didn't get 1/100 engagement of what the original post by @oracle-d made.
What about the hundreds if not thousands of other posts made by Steemians? Heck, @ned even resteemed it, countless whales wrote about it and many other small accounts, yet we only have 2.8k votes currently. Compare that to 4.5k by PAC and try to justify their insane results. I'll help you out.
Their official posts get pathetically low engagement
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Even Kumar knows PAC is a shitcoin
None of the official Tweets nor the ones posted by their community members was fruitful
Their Telegram group has only 2.4k members
The numbers just don't add up.
Doing some digging and trying to find more results matching PAC and NETCOINs I couldn't account for 99% of their votes.
Taking the unworthy of #1st place based on mostly shady activity is consequently, making a platform incentivizing actions/contributions (STEEM) lose in an action based contest and is making us look bad.
As for VERGE
I'm unsure about the legitimacy of their votes. Although I can't say for sure, judging by their social media activity, they might be in the same boat with PAC. They have a strong community of shillers out there so, some of their votes are legit but, a portion of them surely isn't. I just don't know how big it is. Just like PAC, their social media and other promotional activity resulted in extremely low engagement (compared to STEEM) but, as mentioned they have a lot of shillers that might have promoted this contest "manually". Through spamming and shillin' it around to all of their FBIbook friends and college keyboard warriors.
Back to PAC
Are you going to willingly take that bitchslap, or will you continue voting for STEEM over the next 3 days showing PAC shitcoin botters that we can win even when it seems to be impossible? Even against cheaters.
I know that I won't take it and that I'll do whatever is in my powers to help STEEM win. Getting listed on NETCOINs is a big deal! It would be a good step towards mainstream adoption of because.
- It would be sold in 171,000 retail locations in over 53 countries across 6 continents
- We would get free preleases and media exposure on financial sites and crypto sites (Nasdaq, Globenewswire, Coinmarketcap, Coincodex etc…)
- Global OTC desk availability
Thankfully NETCOINs caught up to PACs shady activity
Yesterday night when I placed my vote, I had to input a captcha. That was not the case for my earlier votes. Meaning, NETCOINs probably realized PAC and VERGE have a lot of votes that can't be accounted for. Therefore they implemented captcha to weed out the non-human activity of the before-mentioned shitcoins. Thank you! GREAT MOVE NETCOINs!
STEEM getting listed on NETCOINs is an opportunity I'm not going to willing give away to a worthless shitcoin! Hope we are on the same page about this.
VOTE FOR STEEM AND HELP US WIN NOW!
I think we might be able to beat them, even if they are cheating. The captcha will hopefully prevent or limit their ability to continue cheating, so we have three days to catch up with them now.
Sadly, the captcha is basic and only requires a click on the checkbox so its not bulletproof. Only the normal, annoying one with images would completely diminish their chances of botting.
We can win this for sure but, not if they get another 2 or 3k in a day or two like they managed to before.
I remember reading that the "simple captcha" only shows up for users who tend to complete the "difficult captcha" very easily, as a mean to reduce annoyance for regular users, but still make it difficult for bots. So it might not be that the bots get the simple version of it.
Yeah, you're right about that. We can likely only win if the captcha is able to stop a new wave of bot votes.
I didn't know about that. It would be great if that's the case here.
Another couple of trending posts would also help greatly.
Unfortunately I don't have a credible source for it - I probably just read it on Reddit or something, so take it with a grain of salt. But it would make a lot of sense to do it this way.
hahahaha that's awesome! How many time did you vote?
Just one. Not gonna stoop to their level. I'll try to remember to upvote again tomorrow, but this weekend is ridiculously busy starting tomorrow. Whee, conventions!
That's the way to go! We will win this fair and square. No need to cheat!
Everyone is busy nowadays. I hope you will remember to though :)
They have 0 checks in place for email legitimacy, I was able to vote with a 10minutemail.com account, the most known service for temporary mail accounts. Recaptcha can also be circumvented, but that costs a fee per captcha I believe. So how about we start a fundition campaign to fund our own botnet that upvotes Steem on Netcoins? :D
That doesn't mean they aren't doing it in the background or that they won't do it after the contest ends. I trust that they are not completely incompetent in this department and that they will find out about the votes by VERGE and PAC that are fake and disqualify them.
Hahaha we don't need to :D Imo, by cheating they are shooting themselves in the foot and it won't do them any good in the race we are slowly but surely outpacing them in
I don't ;) I mean, c'mon, who starts any vote that matters online without at least a basic protecting in form of a captcha? I automated stuff like this using a mouse recording program when I was 12..
Oh, and they are not even using HTTPS on their voting site..
They won't disqualify them, it could be not the team but an individual trader speculating on a price jump in case of a listing. They might disqualify individual votes from the same IP/domain range however, but I doubt it
We will see how it turns out in the end. I was in a couple of contests where they left people to scam it out but disqualified more than 60% of them when it ended. Who knows. I find it hard to believe they couldbe so unprofessional about it.
I hope they do, but if someone actually used a botnet instead of a simple script, filtering out abuse votes is almost impossible. And even if they managed to do that, it still doesn't excuse using http - no login credentials are sent, but I am not willing to take the risk of exposing my email address to the whole network by entering it on a website that does not support SSL. This is so unprofessional, I wouldn't trust an exchange like that with my Steem.
they will. How many? No one can say for sure. We can just hope they get the most of them.
Seems like they did not ;)
what do you mean?
We have some time left in our watch and Steemians are sure doing their best to again twice and 3 times as well.
While hope we get to the 1st position. if there would have been few more steps to get it listed so that bot/other things could not cross it than it would have been more legit.
While lets see what happens.
We sure do.It's just a matter of stopping the botters and getting as many Steemians as we possibly can, to vote over the course of the next couple of days.
Yes, or just a harder captcha.
We have the big accounts getting involved and that should help. The whales get people's attention and get people involved.
Some of us have been pumping in the votes but the numbers were disappointing for a long time. We should be able to get a few thousand votes fast.
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Yes! That ws nice to see. Even @ned wrote about it.
It's what we need to see from the leaders. Rally the troops and push steem to a wider audience. It can only help us all in the long run.
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I messaged Netcoins yesterday and left a comment on their facebook that pointed this exact thing out. Like you i checked the social presence of both coins and it didnt add up.
So i wanted to point that out to them so i wrote this.
Today i wake up to see they added the red letter and took notice. What can i say.... LETS GO STEEM!
Me too. They got our message. After implementing first "easy" captcha yesterday, they replaced it with the hard one with images now. It should be much harder to bot this out now. We should be fine!
Btw, I've read a couple of your posts. I love how you write. You say that you are from Croatia. Where did you learn that English? The expressions you use, way you write, to me imply that you are native.
Pozz iz tmurnog Zagreba :D
Haha. Pozdrav iz relativno suncanog Splita. :D
Pa zivio sam u SAD-u 2 godine kao dijete, a djeca jako brzo nauce jezik tako da mi je engleski skoro ko prvi jezik. Dobro, nije bas, jer eto, ne koristis ga toliko u svakodnevnom zivotu, ali skoro. haha.
Back to english.... Yeah, them taking it a step further with the voting security will help us catch up in the last 2 days. If they cheated and won, id have a problem with that, but if they cheat and lose, thats an even bigger win for us.
On another point, i dont think people understand the meaning of this push.... STEEM could have just payed to get the listing... But instead we get to test the strength of the community and the network effect. When netcoins see how much their brand has been talked about, how many people this contest reached, how much engagement those posts had, others might realize the marketing potential of STEEM as well.... And thats why this is big. Not because of some 30k USD.
Tu sam vec godinu i pol i nisam naisao na puno ljudi koji bi se mogli mjerit s tvojom razinom pisanja, izrazavanja i koncipiranja recenica. Svaka cast! Ako tako nastavis, apretpostavljam da oces, daleko ces dogurat ovdje.
It surely will. They have already stopped gaining new votes as fast as they did before. I don't think they have yet rulled out the fake votes so we might already be #1 but we just don't know it yet. IMO probably about 70% of PAC and verge votes are fake. We have nothing to worry about at this point.
Well, like everything in life, it's hard to make people understand anything. No matter how easy or simple it is. This situation is no different.
As for the network effect. We have shown how much we are able to do when the right incentives are in place. We got more than a thousand posts on this. Tens of thousands of comments. Most of the whales have done their part to promote this contest and a big part of the community is involved to some extent. Heck, even @ned resteemed @oracle-d original post on it and then published his own the next day, asking people to help out.
Thus, I will be terribly dissapointed if we don't win. It would only prove that NETCOINs is incompetent an unprofessional. Can only imagine how mad people would get and how many mails they would get from us :D
I didn't wanna focus on that until after the voting stops but I see you took things in your own hands, well done. They are def cheating, there is no other way for them to have so many votes with practically no community what so ever.
That might be the better mentality but I wanted to get this out there. We can just hope they get caught at this point.
Unfortunately Steemians are also cheating, I have read of many who are using two or more email addresses to get more votes in. So I don't see were we can complain of others cheating. What really disappoints me is that I would expect Steem to have at least 10,000 votes every day (only one vote per Steemian) with the user base this should be easy, but that isn't close to happening, not enough engagement. I have already voted three times.
There will always be a couple but nowhere near to what these guys are doing. Their numbers are astronomical when compared to the traffic generated by their publications.
Well, Steem does only have 20k daily active users at this point. What's to blame for most of them not participating is imo the fact that they are overly focused on creating their own content so they don't even get the time to consume any other.
Or maybe they just don't care.
I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like I can't vote on it.
When I press to confirm I'm not a robot, it just spins, and nothing happens.
Am I the only one experiencing this problem?
Lijep pozdrav
Strange. It works like it should for me and I yet haven't seen anyone reporting that issue. Have you tried refreshing the site and voting again?
Pozzz
I've seen it over the past couple of days, and I'll be honest... I sort of ignored it. I have no idea what Netcoins is, but I can imagine it's some new exchange. Not sure if I'm interested in the exchange or not, but I'm certainly interested in the value of Steem. I've voted for STEEM today and will try to to remember to do it every day that I can.
Glad to have you onboard and helping!