What do I mean by the term Junk Accounts? All accounts created only for the purpose of participating in bounty campaigns. 95-100% filled with reports for bounty campaigns, airdrops signups, bounty signups, proves of authentication, altcoins announcements, altcoins ANN threads, translations all made for bounty or just spammy short posts. Most often inactive for a long time (but not always). In various ranks with a lot of posts written in a short period of time when bounties were most rewarding. Most of them do not have additional merits except for the guaranteed pool after the introduction of the system.
There are several types of such
junk accounts. Some of them were/are used only for social media bounties others for signature bounties or for all of them at once. All these accounts followed a simple pattern. Create a
Junk Account and write a few posts to achieve a jr member rank and start the bounties (level1). Further, with bounty reports boost the activity and post count to a higher rank, to be eligible for signature bounties with much higher stakes(level2). When rank achieved start participating with this account in all bounties (level3) and post spam all over the forum, to fulfill signature bounty requirements.
We have literally thousands of such
Junk Accounts created by account farmers and other dishonest users, other members call them bots. Two years ago when bounty campaigns were most successful and the amount of spam on the forum was overwhelming, I started to report all types of fraud and that's when turned my attention to a new type of
Junk Accounts and bots that are used only to participate in bounty campaigns. Reported thousands of them but this was a lost fight.
I am talking especially about social media bounties and accounts that were used to report these campaigns because this is the majority of
junk accounts.
I found hundreds of accounts without a single normal post, only hundreds or even thousands of posts, only with reports with links to Tweets and Facebook likes.
Here are some examples that I found a moment ago after a fast search. It was enough to visit a random old bounty thread and check a few several accounts. It's literally hard to find any normal accounts between them and 95% are just like these ones listed below. I will just add that they are in different ranks from newbie even to senior member. Some even without one normal post.
It's just hard to believe.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/cryptoholder2018-1465626https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/kyledavid-2150664https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/leath-1720191https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/freeokshoes-63007https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/alexgold-1156683https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/dominic06-69101https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/rudilo-1267327Almost a year ago, bounty campaigns stopped to be so insanely profitable and in recent times, the number of scams has exceeded the scale of expectations and fewer members are taking part in them. On the fingers of one hand, you can count good-quality campaigns and many high-rank members have no signature at all or use it to advertise affiliate links.
This proves that the bounty campaigns are evolving and finally the matter of
Junk Accounts should be resolved.
In my opinion, something should be done while is not too late. At this point, there is a good chance to do something without much damage to real accounts and members. Leaving these matter in the booth can create a real threat to the Bitcointalk forum in the future. I will try to explain why.
As you can see, most of these
Junk Accounts are filled with 95-100% with social media campaign reports and the majority of them are currently not active for a long time which can be easily traced, flagged, tagged or untrusted, no matter what. Something has to be done which will be most appropriate and as less as possibly harmful for collateral victims. We have so many brilliant people on the forum that there would certainly be some scripts and tools to filter the forum. Mr. Merit himself could be useful.
Leaving this mess unresolved may result in selling
junk accounts during the next crypto boom at a mass scale and after some time it will be very difficult to perform any action without causing major problems to the forum and other obvious difficulties such as new posts and people, who will buy these
Junk Accounts in good faith, just to ensure a better start (18. Having multiple accounts and account sales are allowed, but account sales are discouraged). After some time they can even be valuable and contributing members with a lot of votes and colleagues behind the back. There are even more dangers associated that we are not aware of right now because everything is evolving so fast. That is why a pragmatic person would like to avoid such problems in the future and resolve the matter if there is a chance.
I have participated in several bounty campaigns in recent years and I know for sure that users of these
junk accounts are certainly not interested in being a real contributing member of Bitcointalk community and to discuss Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology. If I would see that real people are behind these
Junk Accounts and try to learn something or stay active (even with their spammy habits) I would reconsider to give them a fair chance for a clean start. But the majority are bots, made only for the money from the bounty campaigns and once turned out not profitable anymore they stopped to be active (no bounties - no reports) and that's probably not the point?
...
maybe a number instead of a nickname...
Delete them all! 
Basically ends the discussion, at least for me. 
