Topic: How to deal with bumping via fake conversation? - page 3. (Read 1515 times)

Yeah, but we managed to provoke a real response out of one of the paid bumper accounts! Now, if only mprep would just go ahead and lock both the Neluns and Neogame threads rather than individually nuke what may be a nearly infinite supply of stolen accounts this would go a lot smoother. I mean, I have personally had 100+ accounts posting in those two threads banned for plagiarism over the last month - how much proof do the global mods need that something nefarious is afoot?

The Neluns thread farce continues; it now averages ~4 views per post, with tag teams of reactivated 2013/4 spammers ready and waiting to replace those which are deleted, with bumping pseudo conversations.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if milonite (OP of the Neluns thread) reacts to our posts. The OP of the Neogame.io thread deleted one of my warning posts 3 days after I made it so he/she/it is relatively on the ball, but milonite might be a stolen or sold account - much like the bots being used to bump the thread - as prior to starting the Neluns thread he/she/it mainly wrote low-value comments about less well-known Equihash coins (e.g. - Sumokoin and Komodo).

Yeah, it's like talking to the wife - completely ignored

Re: Self mod, that was part of the experiment, OP hasn't been online for a couple of weeks.

Thanks for the help, but notice that the plagiarizing bump-bots just rolled right over both of us!   You would think they'd be happy to have some new material to work with, but no, they are too busy recycling the same conversations that their (now banned) bot brethren used before them. The only good news is that the bumping service is only deploying 2 or 3 accounts at a time now, and the accounts are "old newbies" - that is, dating from 2015 or earlier (ie - from before this forum was hacked) but with their entire post history zeroed out.

Oh, and be on the lookout for your post to get deleted by the OP since it is a self-moderated thread.

Let's see what, if any, human response we can get with the direct approach too....

Ehmagerd... All of the aforementioned threads are still getting bumped because replacements are being brought online within hours of the existing bump-bots getting banned. I then tried reporting the OP of the Neogame.io thread with the recommendation the thread itself get locked/trashed, but that report has remained "unhandled" for 5+ days now. Since the global mods appear reluctant to deal with this in an efficient fashion on my word alone I am asking for at least a few other people to report the OP's of the Neluns and Neogame.io threads for using a paid bumping service (ie - a roundabout way of incentivizing posting) and recommend that the threads be locked.

(Unpaid) bump - I've been reporting more users for plagiarism in the Neluns, Neogame.io, DBX, SafeInsure and Biohal threads but I think at this point these threads need to be either locked or outright trashed as more newbies are being brought online to bump and not all of them have committed plagiarism (lawd knows I'm looking for it).

Yeah, the approach currently being taken by the mods just isn't going to work. There's a new batch of bump-bots (apparently using stolen accounts; see next reply below), some of which aren't plagiarizing (yet), but clearly the conversation is manufactured. I mean, what are the chances than an ANN thread will have 10-100 pages of conversation among 6-12 users then when that group of users are banned the thread grinds to a complete halt only for a new batch of 6-12 users to show up and have the exact same style of low-value conversation once again?

I mean, any human can see these conversations are totally fake, but even when I nail some of the participants for plagiarism the reports are staying unhandled 2+ days later. One report of plagiarism with proof provided should be sufficient to get a user banned. Period. Since that isn't happening for me, I have to assume that mods either don't trust my reports (despite 99% good) or else they just aren't processing them. Regardless, it's getting rather difficult to believe anyone on the staff really cares about addressing the spam problem when the reports from people like me who take the time to investigate abuse on an organized/massive scale are ignored.

Really, at this point the NEOGAME.IO, SafeInsure, BIOHAL, DBX and Neluns threads should be locked, if not totally nuked, as they all are filled with fake conversation between bump-bots and precious little real discussion.

---

Yeah, we figured most if not all of these accounts are stolen, as many of them date back to 2014 but with little or no post history until this year (likely the older posts were wiped to cover up a glaring change in style or language used).

Hello, I'll explain what happened: how you see my account is CoinNextTrue, up to a few months ago my account was CoinNextE, then I was stolen, I tried to make it present to the assistance of the forum, but I have not had an answer .

 So, the "gentleman" who stole my account, he did it with others and now (according to my opinion) easily has multiple accounts that serve to make false arguments, and then cheating the people involved.

 Now, if you want you just have to check and see that I opened the account in July 2015 and I'm Italian, and I did business with Italian forum users, who stole my account is not Italian. Anyway, I told you, ban and give me back my account. Just read the 2015 forum posts to understand that the current "owner" of the CoinNextE account is a scammer.

I forgot, when I was stolen the account I had more than 80 messages and I was Junior Member, this to tell you that the "gentleman" who steals account does not do it by chance, but chooses accounts that are unlikely to be suspicious.

Bye.

Read: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11822698

Ugh.  I wouldn't want your job.  The problem with what MagicSmoker is talking about is that these posts look just enough like legitimate ones that you'd be hard-pressed to state with 100% conviction that they're not actually people responding to one another.

What can you expect when you hire someone to bump your ANN thread?  If it's completely obvious that it's being bumped with "great project" posts, the entire thread might get shitcanned.  This way, it puts enough doubt in a mod's mind (if it's even noticed) such that the thread stays alive--and always on top. 

There will come a day when the ICO market crashes.  People are going to figure out that most of them are scams and that there's no money to be made by investing in them.  When that happens, none of this is going to be a problem anymore.  Can't wait till then.

Outstanding! I was hoping to recruit a few more people this go around because, yes, it is a never-ending battle. One possibly good thing is that all of these accounts are <30 activity newbies so should be much easier to get banned (over 30 and a global mod or admin has to do it).

Oh, and I owed you a merit for your earlier suggestion about requiring more than one report, but the above post is worthy, too.

It's a never-ending battle. They can make as many new shill accounts as they want. In the end, it falls to who is more persistent; we who report these idiots or people behind the bot bumping industry.

Anyway, I'll help you out with what I can,...so far for plagiarism/multiposting I have reported the following accounts:

sigma45, drugrehablocator, microman14, nof21 and sade12.

Will check/report more profiles later today.

Bad news... a new crop of bump-bots have been brought online and shilling has once again resumed on the following threads:

Neluns
DBX
SafeInsure
Biohal - not sure about this one; just 2 new shitposts by newbies.

So far there is no new bump-bot activity (nor really much activity at all) on the EvenCoin and Neogame.io threads, but I'm watching them closely.

The new bump-bot suspects are:

adamkiev
nof21 - reported 2 times
appotus
doggie
microman14 - reported 2 times
maxi23 - reported 1 times
sade12 - reported 2 times
MinceCraft111 - reported 1 times
sigma45 - reported 2 times
drugrehablocator - reported 3 times
Maison - reported 1 times

I think at this point the better strategy might be to get the threads nuked, rather than try to chase down an infinite supply of bump-bot conscripts.

EDIT - update reported counts on above list of suspected bump-bots.

Yep, it looks like the bump-bot ring has been well and truly busted! I'm kind of surprised the shilling went on as long as it did - it started on the very first page of the EvenCoin, SafeInsure, Neluns & DBX threads, page 2 of the Biohal thread, and page 4 of the Neogame.io thread. Pretty much all of those threads are just bots talking to bots.

Two other interesting tidbits: the Neogame.io OP is claiming innocence while the SafeInsure OP only has 3 posts and last posted on Sep 18th (also the day he/she/it joined).


Indeed they are profitable... as long as bots are doing the typing, anyway: I recall seeing an ad that charged 0.5 ETH per day to keep your thread in the top 10 in the ANN section; that's not really a lot of money to have to type out messages every 5-10 minutes (hence why real people aren't doing it).


I hope that requiring 2+ plagiarism reports and/or more than one person reporting the same post isn't necessary in general. Just one example of plagiarism should be sufficient to be banned. Perhaps we just aren't at a high enough rank for a single report from us to be sufficient, or maybe this is the reason for thread here in meta to report plagiarism - I thought it was redundant/superfluous, but if the idea is to get multiple people reporting each post then it makes sense.

All these topics are now like ghost towns, completely abandoned. I'll definitely visit those projects. Bumping bots go hand in hand with scam projects. Let's see if I can find something.


Accounts mentioned above are banned now, they can still log in but cannot do anything else.

As far as I know, these services are quite profitable, and even if they get banned, they will come back as long as someone is willing to pay for their scammy project to be shilled.

---

Sticky worthy.

It's been more than 24 hours the 6 threads I listed above have come to a screeching halt!

So it looks like submitting at least 2 plagiarism reports per user did the trick as all but a couple of the bump-bots logged in this morning around 8AM my time (UTC-4) but haven't posted.

While this took a lot more work than the usual plagiarism reporting, it was also way more satisfying.

Yeah, I was coming to the same conclusion right around the time you posted this, so I loaded up the post histories of some of the bots I'd already reported and found at least 1 more example of plagiarism for each of them. All the new reports are currently marked unhandled so I'll wait another day to see if that does the trick. Pretty much all of the threads I thought I had shut down by reporting the bump-bots are back in full spamming swing again.



Outstanding work! One of the names on your list came up on mine - CoinNextE - which is a bit depressing. Scrolling through that account's history there is a huge gap in dates on p27 as well as a change in wording/style so I'd have to agree that the account was likely sold. That's gonna hurt but good when it's nuked, as it's a full member account.


FWIW, here are the users I've reported at least two different examples of plagiarism if anyone wants to pile on:

bitokman
amanai
slovenia1
12coins
Tiny_Prism
kk777
peetah
Klacik
boomertoo
Green Lantern
guarino


UPDATE - All of my reports providing additional examples of plagiarism were handled/marked good overnight. I also saw that xtraelv posted a shill warning in each of the 4 threads most heavily employing the bots - EvenCoin, SafeInsure, Neluns & DBX. There are other threads they are active in, but those either had less plagiarism or more real conversation going on in between all the bot-chat (with some poor schmucks replying to bots...).

Old thread done by me was with around 70 accounts here:

  Bumping ico-bounty service allowed? 69 accounts involved so far. Need DT or MOD

Some accounts of this list are now sold.

I have been doing something like that recently. Reporting bots for plagiarism. If I remember correctly had around and over 100 good reports (100 accuracy).
The results I got were different, one part of these 100 accounts was immediately banned, one part after a week or two, and a small part is still active shilling scam projects. All accounts I reported was with just one example of plagiarism. (usual one-liner with 50/60 characters)

I wasn't happy with the results, so I decided to do a little experiment :

1. Reported one account as I gave more than one example of plagiarism, it was either 3 or 4. The account was banned almost immediately.
2. The other, I only had one report again, but this time someone else helped me as he also reported the same post. The account was gone right away.

Basically, if you can give more than one example of a copy/paste post or someone else/several people report the same post with you ...you'll get them banned, that's for sure.

Don't forget mods are human after all.