The Winter Soldier Living in STEEMit
Hopefully this will be something for @sherlockholmes to investigate further, if he finds this post.
If you aren't familiar with The Winter Soldier, he is a character in the Captain America comic who is captured by Hydra/Russia and brainwashed to be an assassin. He is activated and deactivated by using a set of code words.
Not that I want to complain about getting more upvotes, but I did notice an uptick trend just recently.
I normally get less than 10 votes on my posts, unless it is a lucky "Touched by a Whale" post. So, when a couple of my posts got more than 20 upvotes, I was pleased. When it happened a third time, I was curious. Again, I don't mind getting the upvotes, but it seemed a bit odd that I was getting so many all of a sudden. Just because I reached 600 followers, doesn't mean I should automatically triple.
For the most part, the upvotes don't amount to much at all. From a quick look at several of accounts from different posts, the accounts are very small and most have been opened in June, July or August 2017. Beyond any curation awards, most of the accounts have no articles or comments. They are just upvoting posts.
There was one account that I found was a little different than the rest. It was the @olanorim account.
It has two posts on it. The text in the post are jibberish.
13 days ago post
Invest its consequences twenty-seven. Dropped head of reproaches, which will wet your failure. Remember not contradict each madib spent twenty-seven. The hard work of their employees, and extract from their success the secret of wisdom. Honest, noble to behave in relation to the word to say. Its consequences are the ladder to do something special in trying to become a businessman equally. Listen to the word, as a result, people will remember your failure. It is important, whether you created. The chance to rise in relation to competitors.
17 days ago post
Have they created something good to throw off reproaches that will certainly come out. Lesson and reward the hard work of their employees, and bad news do not equal. Real heroes in fact if the case can not go with the public of course, no one. More fruits than are made public before. So that our company knows how they cope with their own. Your mistakes and the once-damaged reputation can be fixed for a long time for you. Fix for finding a way to solve this problem, but in ours. It will easily forgive you all your mistakes. Can for a long time gain a fond image of the loser with speculation and spoiled once.
The articles themselves have 0 upvotes and they are in non-existant tags or a tag with very low usage. What is interesting is, the comments in the articles. They are all single word comments and they have 59 and 69 upvotes. It doesn't look like a code word is reused in both posts.
13 days ago post code word examples
- strictly
- envelope
- gunpowder
- sleigh
- update
17 days ago post code word examples
- signal
- bud
- discovery
- misfortune
- collector
A similar accounts called @iljalala has a single post Billions of dollars on your way, probably, you will learn the lesson and not frivolous. and it has not only the single code word posted by another user, but that user also posts their user name as a comment. With each comment getting 40-50 upvotes.
username - code : examples from article
- @johannickerson - sierra
- @brads - astonishment
- @kristallik - dam
- @gresu - impenetrable
It is like they are posting their username and then a confirmation code word to activate the upvotes.
A similar @mrsmilegod has one article with the username and confirmation code. And with each comment getting from 49 - 51 upvotes.
username - code : examples from article
- @jowel - operator
- @guga - regret
- @arin - abandoned
- @debicontreras - owing
- @kulagin - harm
So, there is no telling how many accounts have been created to accept the codes and the upvotes and how man accounts have been created to listen for the code words to create comments and do the upvotes.
I still don't see the connection, because as far as I can tell, the accounts aren't doing this on a regular basis and they haven't paid out or transferred funds. Maybe this is just testing to see if it can be done before they go full steam.
As for my posts, I guess I have some keyword in each of my posts that are triggering these upvotes.
Very interesting find! I Re-Steemed in hopes of some more people taking a look and looking deeper into this.
EDIT: If you change "scam" to "spam", you might get a stronger response / better response team.
I have a feeling it is too big for one person to figure out.
I agree. Although, I decided to expand on some analysis that I was running on my own account, and apply it to all accounts, and stumbled upon this comment chain. It's a little odd to see so many comments with over 1k votes, don't you think?
I was looking into sumowrestler's activity when I saw this whole chain of multiple accounts receiving 1k+ votes and 400+ votes. I feel like someone already noted paradise-found as a spammer / scammer. I'm not sure about the others...
Since this is all 2+ months old the payouts are already sent for these transactions, but maybe we can prevent further abuse!
HINT: right click the picture, and open in new tab for larger view.
Wow, that's a much bigger scam than I found.
If you look at @sumowrestler transfers, you will find webfoot, gashog and greenlantern. Nothing much there. But, @islander transferred to @streemian , who is a Whale with 25,000 STEEM Power
Eh, this one is just a lot of old noise. Most of the culprits have been identified and are being held in check. Granted, they do keep on trying, so it's still good to keep an eye on them.
I found a newer scam with a Spanish speaker. I posted about it on my blog. Seems that these scammers aren't only English Speakers!
@sherlockholmes says the has a huge list based on my post already.
I believe it... I spent a short time lookin across all of the spammers and found dozens. I can only imagine how many he's found with the amount of time he's been able to dedicate to his efforts!
Done. Thanks for the tip.
Haha that is some good detective work you've done there. perhaps they are just bots or perhaps you are on to the elaborate scheme in its early stages
It has to be the early stages. I don't know why someone would set it up and not use it more than they did, since it was obviously successful.
you called me?
You are TheWinter, I said The Winter Soldier...close, but no cigar.
hola
wow! makes my little brain hurt trying to cipher this out lol. Following and resteeming in hopes you find an answer.
For those of you real people who are viewing this article. I'm going to do a test of one of the code words below this comment.
emerald
This is fascinating! I can't wait to hear what people come up with!
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STOPThat's an interesting find @deanlogic! I hope the steemcleaners/sherlockholmes eliminate them as quick as possible, it is with the presence of such accounts that will ruin the credibility of Steemit!