Investigating the Cutieeangel Post Farm
Source: Pixabay
Post Farm Investigation and Take Down
The "cutieeangel" post farm (named after its main account) of 450 @steem faucet accounts has been taken down and delegation has been removed.
The farm was first noticed during the month of October 2018, when it was first added to @spaminator. The accounts were being used to post random images from the internet; mostly of memes and quotes. By November, once they had realised the accounts' payouts were being flagged to zero, they had stopped posting all together and started to power all the accounts down.
During the start of March 2019, around 90 of the accounts had started posting again within the space of a couple of hours only to be auto flagged by @mack-bot. This is how I noticed it was active again. On inspecting the accounts, they had finished powering down and over the course of the 4 months had transferred everything to the @cutieeangel account with the memo "Steem Prize pool entry: Discord" as shown below.
All of these accounts were using the same memo. Then at the end of it all you can see the @cutieeangel account using the @blocktrades exchange to transfer all the loot out.
An Example Spam Post
Here is an example post for you to have a look at. It starts of with a nonsensical title and then the post just contains an unrelated image without any text. It's also tagged #meme. When you check the other posts by this account, they all use the same tag. This is often account bound, each account will use a specific tag over and over, whether it is #meme, #haha, #funny etc.
You will also notice a high number of votes. These are all from the other accounts in the farm which are also posting similar content.
You can learn more about the different exploitative Steem reward farming abuse types here.
GitHub Pull Request (PR)
You can read more about which accounts were added here #64. Because of the PR, Steemit Inc removed the delegation to these accounts.
How You Can Help Stop Abuse
You can help by reporting suspicious activity like this to the @steemcleaners at our Discord or by filling out the form at http://steemcleaners.com/reports/new
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Good job getting those delegations pulled. So, do you have some sort of notifications of when @mack-bot flags or did you just happen to be perusing the activity? This reminds me that keeping tabs on previously flagged abusers wouldn't be a bad idea. Something like a blacklist that a bot would notify whenever activity is detected on the accounts. Definitely food for thought.🤔
I am glad you bring awareness to the redeemer-irredeemables repository which is a valuable resource in getting delegations pulled from abusive networks like these. We need more users to understand faucet abuse and know how it could be dealt with decisively. The more eyes on the better! 👀
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Thanks @anthonyadavisii
A few months after I joined @steemcleaners I wanted to make a web based admin panel to manage our lists as we were just using a google spreadsheet. It was a nightmare. But without going into huge detail, it allows us to manage out lists, groups of accounts, leaves notes etc. We track certain things that are useful to us too. It also made it easy for us to give out our list for use with @themarkymark 's Global Blacklist API which I recommend any apps to use if they want to use the Steemcleaner blacklist.
Yes redeemer-irredeemables is very effective and @roadscape from what I have experienced is very quick to accept any changes.
Thank you for your review, @anthonyadavisii! Keep up the good work!
They think if they stop and resume that they won't get noticed... but you did!
Yes, they do try to be clever, but we try to stay a few steps ahead. hehe
Nice post.
Thanks @logic, I didn't know which comment to respond to you with, so I picked this one at random. :)
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Hi @pjau!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 6.094 which ranks you at #288 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has improved 6 places in the last three days (old rank 294).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 203 contributions, your post is ranked at #33.
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Useful information lol
Informative post.
@pjau why are you delegating to mrkebab while he flags you??? All those flags by shit-posts andflagspedos etc are from him