➡️ Exposing One of The Biggest Abuses on Steemit! @Booster, And How 💲10.000+ Dollars Went to One Nifty Abuser 🤑

in #steemit-abuse7 years ago (edited)

Yes, that's 10k, 10000 dollars... @booster, @fyrstikken, (and anyone that cares about steemit being abused) you might wanna pay attention to this... As seemingly after a month of ongoing abuse of your voting bot, more specificly your frontrunner guild, it is still in the process of being abused. And heavily so!

Along this post I will be exposing the #1 Abuser and how he/she has managed to take an estimated 10k dollars in a month's time.

Many different users have taken advantage of this abuse, myself included. To be fair, I did it to a minium and lost some money in the course as well, due to the bot itself being bugged and giving me half of its votes when used legitimately. This also being the reason I whasn't sure whether to make this post in the first place. Anyways, this thing is getting pretty ridiculous, to the point where its right in hindsight... Just a single look at the transactions being sent in, and the obvious is to be noticed instantaneously.

Let's start shall we

So to start with the obvious, take a look at some of these recent transactions being sent in towards @booster.

booster abuse pic.png

@Booster is a bot with a current vote value worth circa. 188$. This means sending in a 100+ SBD transaction for a vote would be far above the chance of gaining a profitable ROI (return on investment). There might be someone crazy enough to do so, but 3 different persons in a matter of less than a minute of one another... that means something is off.

The second thing is the fact that the transactions get sent back.

Go ahead and take a look at the post, which at the time of posting this is at 70 dollars of vote value. Currently this is one of the highest vote-values gainable (total pool), and basicly gotten for free by using the abuse. With that being said, it used to be almost double of that.

How the abuse works

Don't worry, it can't be abused any more than it already is. So explaining in detail how it works won't make it any worse. And hopefully this way it will be looked at and understood by the owner, @fyrstikken.

The @booster bot has a frontrunner guild tide to it, which has the purpose of giving pre-accumulated votes from users who signed up for it. So that once the bot itself starts voting they get curation rewards for it. This pre-voting is also one of the things that made the service so profitable for its users. Sadly, this abuse is now taking those votes away towards the abusers, and away from its legitimate customers.

In time the abuse seemed to have slightly changed, it used to screw up @booster's votes in some occasions, giving just half of its vote power in a cyclus (so instead of 100%, 50%). This however doesn't seem to be the case anymore as of now. I have noticed some more changes, which if requested so I could go into more detail about. For now lets stick with how it currently works.

Step by step this is how it works

  1. Wait for booster to start upvoting, once it starts voting (and as long as its in its voting cyclus), send in sbd/steem
  2. Get refunded due to @booster not being able to handle transactions while voting
  3. Be the highest bidder in the period of time (voting cyclus), and get "rewarded" by the frontrunner guild

It's as simple as that. Second or third place might still get votes, but fairly less compared to the highest bidder. Again, this used to work slighty different when I first encountered the bug, as along time the abuse seemed to have changed somewhat. During so Iv'e seen some of the greatest frontrunners being drained rather quickly. The biggest ones being @done and @bcc, giving combined votes of almost the current reward pool of 70 dollars. But they at last seemed to have noticed and left the frontrunner guild.

Now let me introduce you to the most nifty abuser of the month! (congrats to you?)

@sumayia or @bright-side, @arnobtogor25, @antor, @antor143, @rihadkhan, @mrpabel, @jakariashikder, @jakiasultana, @zakariashikder, @hasibur, @promita, @photographer2, @sorgo

Yes, I suspect all of these accounts to be of one and the same person. I likely still missed a few. Honestly it's hard to keep track... Just check the transactions between the accounts going forth and back from one another. Which most likely is done so to avoid suspicion in case one gets noticed.

One hell of an abuser.png

As this person has at least 15+ accounts, it's also very hard to predict how much abuse has precisely been done by this user. But seeing as how high the rewards have been in the last month with @booster alone, combined with the current Steem dollar being so high, it's safe to assume a sum of 10.000 dollars this month is a solid estimate.

A lucrative business one could say...

Sort:  

you certainly seem to like to use he word abuse

Make it a drinking game ;)

excellent idea.
anytime someone says the word "abuse" ..everyone downs a shot..

I'm not sure there is any way I could survive that many shots. But I'm down!

OK, now I understand what is going on, thanks @droucil. I got so much missleaded by those massive upvotes on a shitty posts.
In fact I was totally forgotten that I have some rather long time ago registered my posting pass to @booster. In general , if all would work as intended - this bot service could be there without much damage to the steemit system. Who would sacrifice hundreds and hundreds of SBD to get probably less than that in return ? But now, once this bug is explored, there is a huge temptation to get dozens and hundreds $$$ worth of upvotes, virtually for FREE.

We must think and act hard, in order to STOP this abuse.

At least advice the wealthy dolphins and whales how their voting power is wasted against totally useless, shitty posts.

Lets act together !

I have resteemed your post, and going to make my own post soon on this serious problem by our favorite blogging platform

Ultimately there is only one person who can fix this, and that's the owner of @booster. So lets just hope he gets eyes on this and does something about it...

I have fixed my part in just a minutes. By a new password.
Never ever again my SP will be used for upvoting those silly meme's and other shitty posts. ( there been even some in Korean alphabet, where I could not read even one word)

Well people can post what they like. Some people may find it more intresting than others. I thought this platform was made for the common folk.

I see you are still hunting down the steemit abusers. It's very addictive, I followed some of those voting farmers for a while as well, when you mentioned that many of my commenters were farming commenting votes and doing nothing of value for steemit.

Good job!

It kind of came across my path ;) I rather not focus on stuff like this too often though, it eats me up when I start focusing on all the "bad" things.

Same with me (hugs) <3

Thank you for reporting this and bringing it to everyone's attention.
I'm mentioning your article in my up-coming piece about the upcoming battle ahead of our community if we wanna stick it out and rise to our rightful position in the world
Hope you'll check it out when it's out later today ;)
Great piece and following for more cutting edge reporting on the platform's health and other cool topics
Peace man

It's sad to say, because a dim view of humanity, but there have always been people who are willing to take advantage of a system, any system, to profit themselves, even at the expense of others. The scary part is that this could get far worse if Steemit begins to see exponential growth. Sure there are groups and individuals who are doing a wonderful job finding and stopping spam and the like, but immense growth in the user base could easily swamp them. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's good to see people like yourself at least trying to keep the abuses in check.

Wow... nice piece of investigative work-- well done! It's pretty disgraceful what these people are doing. I am not even sure whose "department" this is, since it's basically someone exploiting a loophole in a service and getting something for nothing. Did you message @fyrstikken directly about this?

This seems to be some combination of spam and fraud and possibly "post farming"... @patrice, do you want to look at this one?

I would say it's the responsibility of the owner of @booster in this case, as it's his bot being exploited. I haven't had any contact with @fyrstikken, if you could send him a message with a link to this post for his eyes to see it would be appreciated.

Great detective work @droucil! The conclusion is that a bot should not have a front runner guild I suppose.

I believe it has always worked correctly till they changed the script into accepting Steem as well, but I can't confirm this for sure. For now I would agree that it should be turned off till it's fixed.

thanks for shedding light on this. hopefully it'll get fixed so that our community can thrive

There will always be people without scruples or values, grandparents always say money does not make happiness, and those people in one way or another pay in this life. Very good your information and luck. You have soul of journalist haha

i am frustrated because i am not clear about the bot....i just asked you an easy and simple question that is bot using is perfect for my content???

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