The True Story Of Why I Left Steemcleaners And My History With Them

It has come to my attention that someone is spreading lies about me. They are saying I was kicked out of steemclearns. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The truth is I left of my own accord. Here is my history:

I joined steemit on July 13, 2016. My first run in with steemcleaners was back in either July or August of 2016. They flagged me for having a referral link in my post. Called it spam. I found out they were giving out steem power to people reporting abuse from a friend. My first report to steemcleaners was for spam. It was on August 27, 2016. I have a full log of all steemclearns data from the beginning to the time I left. Here is the entry from a CVS export of the google spreadsheet that was used to record the logs:

['2016', '34', datetime.datetime(2016, 8, 27, 0, 0), 'fubar-bdhr', 'rinkydas', 'fubar-bdhr', 'https://steemit.com/@rinkydas', '1 hour', False, 'patrice', 'H', 'F, Nuke, Sports-Spam Ring', False, False, False, False, '']

That data is read as year, month, date in datetime format, report of the abuse, account committing the abuse, link to abuse, investigator of the post, age of account, comment left on post, person that wrote the log entry, abuse type code, resolution, downvote = flag, nuke = account flagged to negative rep, recommend cheetah ban, follow up, and a comment field which is blank.

At the time there was a group spamming illegal sports streaming sites. This account was found within an hour of creation, the post hidden, and the account flagged to negative rep to hide all future posts. I caught a bunch of these that first couple of weeks. All spam. I spent all day refreshing the new page. There wasn't much posting back then so I would check every post, go do some house cleaning, rinse, repeat. For the first few months I would practically read every post on steemit. I even ended up checking one of anyx's post and having a good laugh about it. I became a steemit reading machine. What wasn't abuse and was a good post I would submit to the curie project. For the first time I was actually making some steem power.

Somewhere along the line I put in for the zathras account. It was the name I was using to moderate on a site. At the time account creation was frozen. Not sure when I put in the request. Probably before I knew about steemcleaners. I actually created 2 accounts. I typoed zathras the first time and spelled it zatrhas. The accounts were created on October 2nd 2016. By that time I knew using the zathras account to promote the business would be considered spam so I never used it. I soon after began using these 2 accounts for steemcleaners. Flagging spam I was reporting.

I then started powering up the accounts with some of the steem I was earning from steemclearns and curie. At the time flagging worked differently. Multiple small flags on a post had more impact then one account with the cumulative steem power. Some of you may remember posts on cheetah getting 7-9 flags buy accounts like cheetah01 cheetah34, etc. I then setup a voting trail on I think the site was steemian? This way I could flag with one account and the others would flag as well. This saved time from switching accounts to do it manually. I then gave these 2 accounts away to a good friend but also kept the keys. It was someone that also wanted to fight abuse but keep it secret. This way they could use the trail to flag with those 2 accounts and this one. I'm nocturnal and they were up when I was sleeping so it worked out well.

Since I still had keys to those accounts I decided to start posting on them to get them some more steem power to be able to flag more abuse. I started off with some regular posting. Some videos, images, etc. As luck would have it I noticed the same day there was a call for people to start posting newslinks. Whales were giving them upvotes to encourage putting them on steemit. This was intended to bring more people to steemit. Well I used the opportunity to power up those accounts more. Something I have continued doing to this day and will do as soon as I finish this post.

Now for beerbot. I created this account well to be a bot. Something like cheetah maybe. I wanted to figure out how to make a bot. I didn't have the time to actually do it though. I added it to the trail and started powering it up the same way. I figured I would use it eventually and I did. I will get to that later.

By this time I was also using the trail to flag at the request of other steemcleaners members. When steemcleanrs didn't have enough voting power, was out of votes, or something was abuse but didn't quite fall under steemcleaners scope they would ask me to flag them. Some also had the adm account to do this too. I didn't get keys to adm until way later. Yes adm. We always denied adm was part of steemcleaners. While it was owned by abit keys were given to senior steemcleanrs members and some outside of steemcleaners.

Next is fubar165. I created this account because I use FUBAR165 on other sites where they don't allow - in names. I didn't want anyone to take it and make it look like it was me. Another account for the voting trail. More accounts, more steem power, more impact for the flags.

Back to my history with steemcleaners. After 4 weeks of reporting abuse I was made a member on Sept 19, 2016. My first log as a member was for phot plagiarism. My 4th log was for spam. By the end of November most members were barely around and I was doing the majority of the abuse fighting. By the end of the year I was doing over 90% of the work.

By this time the person making the posts that earned the money for the payouts had disappeared. There was no money coming in and anyx had to power down steemcleaners to have steem for the payouts. Without the logs there was no transparency with the people of steemit. On Jan 6, 2017 I put together all the data from the previous weeks and started doing the logs myself. I wrote a program to pull the data from the google spreadsheet in cvs format (why I still have all the data). The program would format all the links for me. I would then take the output, verify all the data was present and valid, and take that output and manually create the post or posts. As the amount of abuse increased we switched to daily logs to earn more steem power for steemcleaners. The posts were not making more steem then the power downs. There was more than enough to make the payouts. anyx had asked steemcleaners (basically me at that point) what to do with the extra steem. We could take it as higher payouts. I told him to use it to power up. Having the power to fight the abuse was more important to me than the money. Granted money is always nice.

Somewhere along the line the voting trail site went down. I finally decided to sit down and write a bot. My first bot was a voting trail bot. This gave me the knowledge to later write other bots. I think my next one was a notification bot. It would look for mentions in posts and throw who mentioned and the link to the post into another google spreadsheet. This meant people could now mention steemcleanrs in a post and we could check it faster. I then made a bot to log all transfers and their memos. This made finding multiple scammer accounts easy.

Now came the big run up in BTC price and with it steem and SBD. Members started coming back. At the time I was happy there were more people. I was fighting abuse 12 to 18 hours a day. Every day. The only day I ever took off was the day the blockchain froze. In retrospect I realized them coming back was due to money to be made. I was working my ass off when steem was under 10 cents. New members were even brought in. Most didn't last. The one that did hated me from the start. Always complaining I was letting people off to easy while he was going after people on whims. Though every pretty girl was a scammer, requesting id verification with no evidence. I finally just started ignoring him and let others deal with him.

At least this gave me some time to code. I made bots to find potential spam links and log them for me to investigate. Made a bot that looked for tag spam in certain tags. A bot that would log cheetah finds. A bot that would find upvotes by known scammer ring members. Another that would track people who flagged cheetah or steemclearns comments. One that tracked posts by people on the mentor list to make sure they weren't repeating abuse. This was all merged into one big bot: BeerBot. I still didn't have a use for writing to the blockchain with beerbot though.

Phishing time. The first major phishing attack began. We were busy as hell trying to keep up with it and protect accounts. I copyied my spam finding bot and made it detect phising. It would automatically find and log any known phisihing links or posts/comments by known phishing accounts. It would record all accounts that made private key changes. It would log all transfers too and from known fishing accounts. It would even alert people on discord when a phisher was found. Then the phisher thougt he got smart and started using url shortners. I updated beerbot to check all posts/comments for short ulrs and reply to those comments with a message about the potential dangers of short urls. This halted the phishing attack in its tracks. The phisher even tried to bribe me to take the bot down. Sent me a transaction with a memo that he would give me half of what he stole.

The problems start. With the 1m steem delegation from steemit inc (they hid the delegation by using an alt account so people wouldn't know it was from them) we finally had enough power to start taking down some of the bigger accounts we didn't have the power to touch before. Belive it or not even with that much power and adm we were still running out of power. I was still using my trail to support steemclearns. But with the delegation came politics. I had told anyx on many occasions that I would not play politcs. The push to take fighting spam and scammers (the bitconnect kind) out of steemclearns scope began. Members even clamind fighting spam was never in steemclearns scope. I had made a promise to the community to fight spam and had fought spam since my first report. The evidence of that is in the logs. But steemit inc didn't like this. Apparently they threatened to remove the delegation if I kept going after the scammers. I must have stepped on the wrong toes. Flagged some friends or something. I'll never know for sure. But I wouldn't play games. If I couldn't fight spam and scams I wouldn't be a part of steemclearns. Talk went to I wasn't worth the delegation.

I then had a long talk with anyx:

Shortly after I left. I wasn't removed like people are saying. I felt pushed out. I wouldn't play politics. I wouldn't bow to people getting unflagged because of who they knew or what steem they bought. But before I was even out the door one member called for the destruction of all my accounts. The accounts that supported steemclearns. All the time it benefited them they were fine.

If you are wondering what that little bit extra anyx gave me after I left was? It was over $2000 SBD. I promptly gave it away to a couple friends that needed some help. In fact I gave them ever SBD I ever made with steemcleaners (and probably more). After that I didn't want the filthy money. I washed my hands of it. Only thing I kept was the steem that I had powered up.

Several weeks ago they started to make good on that threat. Commenting and flagging posts that followed all the rules. With that harassment I checked into the law. Hear it's illegal. I made a post about it and at least the flags stopped. I lost most of the followes that were voting the posts though. Then 5 days ago a new group steemflagrewards takes over where steemclearns left off. Hell bent on destroying what toom me over 3 years to build up and finish driving me off of steemit. They admitted to cooperating with steemclearns.

I'm not welcome here. Never was. Was hated by the scammers and was never welcomed by the community at large. The only person outside my friends that I ever though supported my work was liberosist who ran curie. Never had any support for my witness. Politics is where it's at on steemit and I don't play that.

All the evidence is there. I was not removed from steemclearns. I was not committing abuse. The abuse they claim was me flagging someone with pull with steemit inc most likely. Or maybe I flagged one too many EOS spam posts.

The stress from all this harassment nearly put me in the ER yesterday yet they claim it's not harassment

Longest thing I've written since high school that wasn't code. Now here are some stats:

Total abuse cases while I was with steemcleaners: 37356 of those I did the following:

Reported 14495
Investigated 23404
Logged: 24316