Abuse Series: Vote Farms

I work in IT and am quite used to life cycles. They have a start and a finish where completion happens. Everyone plays their role and it's a happy ending with a finished product at the end of the cycle.

Scammers also have a life cycle, but in this case, the ending is usually not happy and may continue via reincarnation.

Most of us joined Steemit to make money. That was the lure; we could write content and earn something.

Scammers also join for this reason. Some with illusions of grandeur that they will become wealthy and use the eco-system as a get rich scheme.

We all know that it's simply not going to happen but ‘they' will still try and milk the system using the least amount of effort required. Abuse using vote farms is a common example.

Vote Farms

To create a Steemit account, you need an email address and a valid mobile or cell phone number.

Creating a vote farm I imagine would take a great deal of effort. 400 Steemit accounts, with 400 emails and 400 cell phone numbers needs to be created by somebody. There are no ‘bulk creation' tools that I am aware of.

Each one would need to be logged on to and verified. How you can get that many independent cell phone numbers I really don't know. They know things that I don't.

All this work for a small vote?

It hardly seems worth it and yet we see these farms on a regular basis all upvoting each other's pitiful content in the hope that nobody notices and they can continue unabated.

Look at the number of votes vs the reward (below). If it looks like this then it merits investigation.

The accounts generally consist of the 15 delegated SP type and little else. Combined they form a vote of maybe $0.12 - $0.18 or so.

Content starts to appear from one of them which could be a photograph or a line of text but is usually very insubstantial.

A Working Example.

An example of a vote farm is the recent flags given to @rerycore. This person was noticed well over 2 weeks ago and warned, yet chose to not heed the warnings given and continued regardless.

He was happy to just capture the BTC/USD screens every day using little effort and a standard template like this one.

The rewards are not significant but if there are many of these farms doing the same thing, they can quickly add up and poach from the reward pool.

There are TWO accounts in this case with a $0.01 vote, the rest are $0.00 ones. Most of the time, vote farms are ALL $0.00 accounts.

What happens next is quite typical. The vote farm is exposed to @steemflagrewards via the ‘flags-needed' section and the Abuse Fighters/Collaborators are made aware.

The flags start to be applied and the rewards are removed usually to zero. @rerycore does have a little more in the form of rewards to come, but I will make sure they are all removed by day seven if nobody else does.

The Consequences of Tackling a Vote Farm

Vote Farms are ideal for Abuse Fighters with a small amount of SP (at least $0.03). They usually consist of many small accounts so their actions of retribution are negligible.

In this case, @rerycore has hit @steevc, me and some SFR members with some $0.01 flags but that is to be expected.

When caught, the abuser's that don't want to listen tend to try and go out in a 'Blaze of Glory' often while powering down. This happens frequently and can be read from a script, it's simply that predictable.

The good news is that this perpetrator in the farm has stopped posting and in @rerycore's case is powering down. For me, that is a win.

The poor work that he has contributed to the STEEM blockchain is no longer feasible to create. I wish him well on whatever he chooses to do next and I need to make it clear to him that it is nothing personal.

Conclusion

Vote Farms are relatively commonplace despite the effort it must take to create them. When one closes, another from the same pool may start up. It's an ongoing battle to deter these people (accounts) to stop doing it.

Talk about the phoenix rising repeatedly from the ashes but it's honestly more akin to a dirty bird full of oil flapping its wings and trying to rise up.

The effort of finding another thread from farms takes time and patience. We are very fortunate to have the SFR team to do this.

For smaller accounts, this kind of flagging is not going to really hurt the smaller SP Abuse Fighter so I would recommend it as a starting point.

SFR needs more flaggers and more delegation to help with the rewards for the flags. If you can help with either then please join our cause.

Abuse Series: Vote Farms is part of an ongoing series that I plan to write about abuse on the STEEM blockchain. The next one will be Abuse Series: Bid Bot Abuse.