Topic: 36 spammers, one person. Is this kind of affiliate spam allowed on the forum? (Read 626 times)

Just for the record, look how many of his (Jr. Member+) accounts have posted in only one page of a thread created by one of his alts: http://archive.fo/xDCVO

Phoenixdowndee's history is scary. Going through the pages (page 2, archived) only proves more and more how much of a spammer he is (plus he's using link shorteners, probably to hide the affiliate). But I think that's already been proven through my OP..

This spamming ring has a damn long history. After a few hours of research I haven't found very helpful new information such as other alts. I think I've found all of them, so the total number of alts stays at 58 for now. I found a few more details and links though - I'll just leave them here as it might come handy to someone in the future deciding to research an user:

• phoenixdowndee hosted a Crowdholding Trezor giveaway and his own alts have joined.
• phoenixdowndee most likely has a direct link to Crowdholding. The account's first ever post was the Crowdholding ICO closure announcement. He also hosted a referral campaign, his own alts joined it. (I tried to use the information they've posted hoping to discover something else but no.)
• jimsteel, one of the spamming members, posted a thread asking why "their friend" had an account suspended on BitcoinTalk (digital_weezer) back in 2017. His "friend" digital_weezer, jimsteel and phoenixdowndee have all posted at least once a very similar reply: digital_weezer's, jimsteel's, phoenixdowndee's. There are more alts of his who've done it, but I won't go through all 58 I've found so far.

Seeing how all these accounts link together and all of them have excessively shilled Crowdholding, I am starting to suspect I just exposed an operation launched by Crowdholding themselves to pump their coin and show a very false image of it and to convince people through fake threads, giveaways and accounts that Crowdholding is a thing and people should bet their money on it. In other words, fake publicity.

Here is phoenixdowndee's reply to the ICO's ANN:

By using the pronoun "me", it sounds like he is directly affiliated to Crowdholding. If we go back to my OP, 6 out of the links I have quoted are publish0x affiliate links about Crowdholding.
I went through almost every single page of his alts hoping to get a crypto address, a Telegram/Twitter username, anything.. but apparently they were smart enough not to post them anywhere to avoid getting exposed. So I guess the fun ends here.

Hopefully the remaining unbanned accounts will be taken care of too. Thank you, mole0815 for your efforts!

I meant that they are very similar but not a direct copy/paste, it's more like a text spinner used which the plagiarism bot won't detect. They surely can be reported as plagiarism.

i also cleaned up these 2 users directly.

there are a few more alts that belong to it.
this is not forbidden in principle... so i only took action against real rule violations like ref link spam and plagarism.

//edit: the "easy ones" have already been solved. the tricky part will be users with 1, 5, 100 or 115 merit i can't just clean up. someone else has to help now:





and so on... there are many more

Haha, this gave me a good laugh. I've seen you rain merit on so many users, your username should've been TMAN50. Thank you so much. Will not forget about the PM



Thank you (and everyone else I haven't thanked yet) for the merits. I'll keep doing this, it's fun to be honest.

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Meanwhile, I have found two more alts of this guy. Therefore, the list expands for now to 58 total number of members. Will update OP and extend the research later as I promised. Here you go:

57th user: Molekulabig (Newbie)


58th user: champagneboudoir (Newbie)

I think I'm going to up the number of merits I gave him as well, since this obviously took a lot of effort on his part and he presented the evidence very well.  Great job sniffing this BS out, OP. 

These idiots are sneaky and many times they just fall under the radar, especially when they make their spam posts in sections that are already heavily-laden with shitposts.  They know exactly what they're doing--but I'm glad this particular ring got busted.

PM me in 30 days dude, this effort deserves a rank up, ill make it rain in merits for this action..

you will feel like a strip club hoe with me making merits rain on you.

well done

Sounds great! Will prepare the names for the next nuke launch as soon as possible. There still are a ton of users I have missed in the threads I've researched.

if you look at the timestamps of the posts you can see how long it took me to get it done

now i have all users where these points apply
- listed in this thread
- newbie (and were not protected)
- have broken the rules
cleaned up by nuke.

that was a neat blow against this huge construction. we can continue here if there are new clues (+ proofs).
keep up this great work 20kevin20

I notice repetecrypto when he opens this thread, asking for writers for that shity news portal which is spam all over the forum with their so-called journalism. At least one of the accounts mentioned in the OP participates in the above thread, but somehow it seems to me that there are a few others who were just doing the bump.

Whatever punishment they get will not be undeserved, members like this only pollute the forum, good work 20kevin20

I see. Thanks for the cleanup! I'll look into the other accounts when I'll have some free time again. It's fun but there are so many I can't keep up with them.



Doesn't copying another member's reply count as plagiarism?

repetecrypto and fridacrypto looks more like Bots to me!

fridacrypto posts always after repetecrypto and they have nearly the same activity and posts !

Reminds me when we was starting at Spambusters and catched Bots like that !


Hope the Bot does but if so normaly he would catched them or ?

i look through the list of you and intervene in case of rule violations. users that cannot be cleaned up or additional users that were not yet listed here must be looked at in detail afterwards.
it's very time consuming but worth it. in the sense of the community this is time we simply have to spend. we all profit from it

They are not really plagiarism, the links are different but the publisher is the same based on this code at the end of the link a=GELe3POa69.
There is another bot who reports links and string patterns but I have not send him the code, I guess because they could be reported manually.
I still think that his bot is working ^.

Thank you for taking the necessary action. Appreciate it.

By "working my way through the rest of the users" are you talking only about the users I've quoted here in my thread or do you have the necessary resources to get a list of ALL the alts this guy has?

In other words, would it help if I'll look for even more alts of this guy or is my research enough?

Nice catch OP !
This deserves for sure some Merit.

Looks like suchmoons reporting bot is not longer active 
Activate it from time to time again suchmoon.


Normaly the ones that are not newbies and you cant handle can be reported or handled as plagiarism !

when you are part of the staff you have some very special opportunities.
one that I had never used before... and that was nuke!

but cruptocosta67 deserved to be the first to feel it

we will surely get the rest of the connections we have uncovered here under control.
there are several ways to prevent this. step 1 is done

//edit: i'm still working my way through the rest of the users.
all those who are suspected to have violated rules and the profile "newbie" i'm cleaning up now.

Thank you for the merit and for the kind words. I have no idea what we must do, if I had the right to ban accounts, I'd just ban every single alt of his (or permaban his IP).

I didn't know I could use Archive.org for full threads, that's why I asked LoyceV to archive it. Thanks for the link! And sorry, Loyce, for putting more work on your shoulders in my previous post.

I will search for more accounts later, I have a feeling there's going to be more than 100 total accounts used by this guy I'll find..

Let me take some work off LoyceV's back, I think he already have enought
I have archived the whole thread here > http://archive.fo/pQzQO
Good work man,we need more people like you around. What shall we do after we make a connection between them? NegTag them or report them for ban?

I guess you will find the same accounts posting here as well.

Update: I found something interesting that confirms my idea of phoenixdowndee possibly being the owner of all these accounts. This thread has been started by him, includes the affiliate I am researching and every single account below has posted in his thread.


I found more users. Some of them may have not posted the links themselves, but they're communicating with the spam members from my list using the exact same words. It's a pattern. If they are NOT alts owned by this guy, I can still consider it breaking the rules by plagiarism. This is just ridiculous - it's endless, I just can't believe how many there are out here. Will update OP with the new findings soon.

37th user: beetlejam (Full Member)


38th user: burundicraze (Newbie)


39th user: tavernakava (Jr. Member)

40th user: lisacrypton (Newbie)


41st user: 1978krcz (Newbie)


42nd user: jamesbean (Newbie)


43rd user: georgeforeham (Newbie)


44th user: bench4rench (Newbie)


45th user: Romaniandanceparty (Newbie)


46th user: UBergneru32 (Newbie)


47th user: milanka432 (Newbie)


48th user: kopyto_zahrada (Newbie)


49th user: sandersspoolge (Newbie)


50th user: BranAssFace (Newbie)


51st user: kalovyvarybarry (Newbie)


52nd user: locusparty (Newbie)


53rd user: quarterpounderwithcrypto (Newbie)


54th user: petersapartment (Jr. Member)


55th user: dashamasha (Newbie)


56th user: tommydavis45 (Newbie)

@LoyceV can you scrap this entire thread & all replied and archive them all in case this guy deletes it?

Oh I remember this one, publish0x was (and maybe still is) a platform paying for articles and somebody decided to spam the forum with his links.
I wonder what will happen now, back then the posts were reported and I think only deleted (seems like not all of them). Situation probably didn't change much since then.
I'd love to hear what the mods think on that one? How it will be handled this time?

Sh!t man, out of sMerit, Please someone send 1 merit from me, the guy has to rank up to Hero in month or two
@Theymos when MS??

That script only works on one thread at a time. Feel free to request thrads to be scraped for list of users who posted in there.

In this case it would fit better to search through all posts, but unfortunately I'm tight on time lately.

Originally gave you 20, but that much effort deserves and extra 10 merits!

keep it up dude well done

Thank you! I will post archived links ASAP to everything in the OP too. Here's a list of rules I think the users broke:

Rule #3: No referral code (ref link) spam. This user is doing more than just spam. He's flooding the forum.

Rule #12: No duplicate posting in multiple boards (except for re-posting it in the local language boards if it's translated). The first user I've researched posted not a duplicate - 9 identical posts in different boards/threads.

Rule #23: When deciding if a user has broken the rules, the staff have the right to follow their interpretation of the rules. I think there should be a more specific multi-account rule too. Like I understand when someone has 2-3 alts, but using +35 for spam and to create fake posts to convince others to click the links is too much, isn't it?

(Possibly) Rule #24: Advertisements (including signatures within the post area) in posts aren't allowed unless the post is in a thread you started and is really substantial and useful.

Rule #32: Posting multiple posts in a row (excluding bumps and reserved posts by the thread starter) is not allowed.


Thanks, it took about 2-3 hours including the thread structure and everything. I started from my phone but it was a pain to try doing this from mobile..

as above great catch dude, out of interest how long did this all take you?

wow very good catch
there is a lot of work behind it and that should be rewarded.
have checked a few users and agree with your findings... the question is which rules were violated and how to deal with it.
only deleting posts will not provide a long term solution. clean up users completely? create a flag?

maybe LoyceV could create a nice listing like this of all affected users so we can come to an correct solution of this problem.

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I was researching a member's account to see if they have any alts by looking through posting patterns. The pattern I went for was "Nice article, thanks for sharing.".

When I saw these exact words and punctuation at the beginning of an user's post, something clicked in my mind. I've seen this before, and not just once. So after looking this up, I've found out something completely different: a spam pattern on a ton of threads, posted by lots of different Newbie-Jr.Member accounts, promoting the publish0x affiliate code ending in "a=GELe3POa69".

It all started from cruptocosta67's post that I found a few minutes ago (prior to writing this thread):

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I will post research only about cruptocosta67, all the other accounts can be linked to each other in the exact same way. The thread would become way too long if I included all the research.
First of all, here are three identic posts on 9 different threads by this user:


Burstposting the same reply to 9 different threads (there are more, but I gave just 3 for the example). Not shady enough? Here comes the big bomb of the publish0x referral code spam:

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USERS SPAMMING THE SAME REFERRAL LINK:
These are users that have posted replies/threads in which they have included the affiliate code bolded ad the beginning of this thread.


And here are some links to posts in threads that have been locked (each comes from an UNIQUE member), having the same affiliate ID:
1. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.50542332 (roganite)
2. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.50310812 (altcoinhoarder65)
3. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.50497943 (operodareo)
4. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.49977809 (magicdave)
5. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.51196708 (bleskyblesk)
6. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.50978281 (kitchenishome)
7. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.51139739 (handy_hotdog)
8. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.51145368 (iloveturtles)
9. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.51338028 (cryptopiper)


Even cruptocosta67 himself (the guy in the first quote of my thread) posted the same referral link:

This is a total of 56 unique accounts posting the same affiliate ID throughout the forum. Here is the list of these users:

Here's a list of their ranks:

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Now to prove the link between cruptocosta67 and the other members, I'll randomly choose 5 members from the list above and I will show, through quotes, that there has been communication between them (I will remove empty lines from quotes to shrink them):

1. kocicinissi:

2. cryptowomba:

3. jimsteel:

4. kitchenishome:

5. cryptopiper:

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I found that one of these users is wearing a signature for a bounty. This could be the main account of all these 36 I have found: phoenixdowndee.
So.. am I missing something? After finding all this huge load of spam, I was really wondering: is what this member (because I think this is enough proof to call it ONE member) is doing really allowed on the forum? Because I think this is abuse.

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Updates to the OP with new findings:
1. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.53782555 (more accounts found, updated list from 36 to 56 members)
2. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.53784283 (more accounts found, updated list from 56 to 58 members)