Topic: [LIST] ANN threads that are using bumping services - page 13. (Read 7377 times)

Hi, I will answer on behalf of PrimeBit. I run their signature campaign and support them in marketing.

Thank you for your understanding and positive reaction.

When it comes to contacting with "Vitor services" it was not via Bitcointalk. The first contact was via an email to the PrimeBit marketing department with the offer from https://vitor-services.company/ and it was a consequence of what happened in the official PrimeBit thread.
The second time they contacted directly with me two days ago (09/30/2020) via Telegram. I don't think they checked that I am working with PrimeBit. My answer wasn't rude, but they quickly realized what I think about their service. 

Hehe, thanks! I was in a sort of reporting frenzy these days. Actually, in less than 2 days I made almost 2000 good reports! I reported 718 posts of all users mentioned here, 870 posts of all users mentioned here and ~350 more posts of all users mentioned here.

Regarding my comments for reports, they vary depending on the offense. I use the most the following ones:

- for newbies spam-bumping - "Zero value post"
- for OP spam-bumping - "Breaking rule 21. Old bumps should be deleted" or "Breaking rule 32. Posting multiple posts in a row"
- for casual spammers (those trying to farm their accounts with more posts or those trying to get more posts inside a signature / bounty campaign) - "Spamming with zero value posts, in various boards" or "Spamming with zero value posts, in various boards, in order to have more posts for the signature campaign he is a part of" or "Spamming with zero value posts, resurrecting old threads and breaking rule 32. Posting multiple posts in a row"
- for shillers - "Constantly shilling a website" or "Constantly shilling various websites".


I see they keep spamming the topic, I just reported now a few more posts of them. They must be kept under attention.


I'll try to report all the posts made by the accounts mentioned by nutildah and all the other posts made inside the respective topics. However, I'm not sure how much time I'll have during the weekend. I'll see what I can do today.

First of all, I am glad to see that you realized your mistake, admitted it and stopped with their "service". As a matter of fact, this is the first time since I created this thread that someone admitted hiring "marketing agency", and even naming. Because of that, and because you reacted relatively fast (in a matter of couple of days) I will remove your name.  Hopefully more names from the list will do the same and stop using these kind of services.

Regarding Vitor Services, they are known name here on bitcointalk, and they are responsible for majority of thread bumping on this forum. Almost every time when I add new thread to the list, it is possible to find connection with one of their older clients. By the way, how did they offer you this? Did they contact you directly on the forum (and if yes please share the account name) or it was done externally?



EGGSBOOK just started with their bumping, so that's why I think number was so low, but from my experience it is a good thing to start reporting immediately as sometimes they just give u when they see that posts have been deleted regularly, basically on the daily basis. Regarding Primebit, I reported those few days ago, but there weren't many posts to begin with.



I am personally using " ANN bumping spam", and when I am cleaning thread that is proven scam,  use " ANN bumping spam, promoting scam". Those are my two that Im using in 99% of the cases when reporting this.

---

Latest addition, making it 74th on the list.

[ANN][POS] UCACOIN - Community Coin ICO Upcoming
As reported by @nutildah, they recently started with thread bumping. Some accounts used are new, and some  are part of previously tagged group of accounts that also abused merit system, among other things.

Wow, great going, that's a lot of posts! Out of curiosity, when you report the posts, what comment do you give in your report? Do you write "Spam" or... what do you write? My top labels for reports of bumpers are:

low value post
spam
off-topic

sometimes if a post is particularly bad I'll write:

zero value post

"Low value post" seems to be my go-to.

This is just a small heads-up: I just reported all the posts (actually not all, but >99% of them) made by the 20 users mentioned by nutildah in that Excel file (around 350 posts). All of them were deleted by the mods already and the accounts are as clean as Brand New I'll take a look later over the other links mentioned below nutildah's post.

@nutildah, as a small note, you have the user medalizich noted twice in the Excel file

Edit: I just cleaned 3 more topics.


I just 14 spams from the above mentioned topic. These were all the spam posts I found. Maybe others were deleted already.


I just 22 spams from EGGSBOOK. These were all the spam posts I found. Maybe others were deleted already. I did not find any spam on PrimeBit. I guess this topic was already cleaned before the cleaner came in

I am writing regarding the quoted post.

Short description what happened:
One person from the team agreed to a test check of "Vitor Services" without consultation. He did it just before the weekend. The weekend made us realize what was happening late on Monday. In Tuesday immediately we resign of this unethical service. They stopped a few hours after our resignation.
At the moment, the entire thread has been almost completely cleared of Vitor posts, and the accounts are probably banned by moderators.
No one at PrimeBit is looking for such advertising services. It was a mistake resulting from poor verification of the company offering the marketing service.
Please try to understand this and we would be grateful if you will remove Primebit from this infamous list.

Let me know if you need additional information to make a decision.

You are right, it is an obvious case of thread bumping. Majority of accounts used have been made few years ago and now they suddenly decided to appear on that thread and fake the interest and "working" mostly in that thread. Anyway, thank you for letting me know, Baex Dapp ANN has been added to the list.


I agree that we should have stricter rules for this but well, it is what is, we can still reduce that spam by reporting posts as sometimes they get bored of that and give up. It is rare, but it happens.

Another project with bumping services.

ANN BaexDapp - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5278713

Moderators should go hardline with projects doing these kinds of spams!

Frequently this is the case but sometimes you do know who is running the bumping service. Let me introduce you to Vitor Services. Whats interesting about them is some of their testimonials were written by team members of projects which had hired them here on the forum, so it was easy to trace them to that particular bumping service.

Furthermore, sometimes batches of accounts will overlap from thread to thread; meaning that it is possible to connect which threads have hired the service based on the accounts posting in them. Here is the best way to demonstrate a spam farm, by demonstrating the overlap between threads and the cluster of accounts:

From my experience, mods really need strong proof to delete topic, at least here in English part of the forum. Thing is, airdrop spam is usually easy as spot as posts are even more redundant than those made by bumping service, and usually there is some proof of posting incentive, whether through airdrop sites, or sometimes they advertise that in their telegram group, like in this example. In those cases, topics usually get deleted.

---

Two new threads added:

PrimeBit.com - P2P Exchange Platform for P2P Currencies, up to 200x leverage
Exchange platform that hired bumping service few days ago. Accounts used are also active in several projects that are doing the same thing, among them is one obvious scam, ZYX.

edit: Primebit was removed since they admitted and stopped with that activity.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.55299874


🔥🔥 EGGSBOOK TOKEN - A COMMON CRYPTO-CURRENCY FOR P.O.P. BASED GAME 🔥🔥
Another thread that hired bumpers recently. I've tagged OP of that tread previously for impersonating another bounty management service. All the other threads where accounts are active have been previously added to the list.

This is not entirely true, since we do not know who is running the "Bumping services", and we cannot know if their accounts have already received warnings or red flags.

As The Pharmacist once said, it boils down to this: Shitposters write poorly-written posts, Shitposters produce vapid content.

But if you still don't have enough arguments to leave a red tag to the "bump'members" who buy and sell this shit as a service, you can just visit resources like "airdropalert, airdrops_io, etc". You just need to find conditions among the hosted airdrops that do not comply with the bitcointalk rules.

Try sorting threads by number of views and you will see the ratio of posts / views. When I notice that the view-to-post ratio is less than 25/30, I will at least take a closer look at this ANN and see what the abnormal thread activity is based on. You can also leave a message in the thread itself, with a warning for the OP and for the Shitposters.

I mean, if you did a few of these simple things and, in addition to reporting, report it, the moderator will not pass by (at least this is the case in the Russian section). But if you still don't see enough evidence, you can PM me or this thread, then I can dig deeper.

True, I do add a lot of them and despite that many go unnoticed as unfortunately this bumping scene is still alive and kicking, despite changes in bumping system. I do tag OP of those threads where I have more proof that it is a scam. Regarding archiving, if I ever have to provide an additional proof, I can use 53M posts! View unedited/deleted posts (search per post, per user or per topic).


Yes I now that mods can delete threads if there is a proof that OP is paying for comments, but afaik, you have to have really strong evidence for that to happen. I report those when I have proof, I usually make post about it in [CLUB] The SpamBusters! Busting rule-breakers constantly and then report to the mods.

Regarding accounts that are used for shilling, as @nutildah pointed it out, I do tag them when there is a strong connection to scam promotion, like in this case I discovered today User NUMAS selling codes for "dirty" BTC with 50% discount. where I tagged all bumping accounts involved. I used to tag them more often (as did others I think) but since those "marketing agencies" as they like to call themselves have unlimited amount of newbie accounts, they simply ditch those and start using new ones. And we are talking about hundreds or maybe even thousands of accounts used.

I don't think its a bad idea to tag bumper accounts if one feels strongly about it... I think it definitely solidifies the case for a tag if the same bumping service was found to have been bumping a scam project in the past. But in general, its the scams that tend to employ these types of services; whether or not the project account deserves a red tag I think should be based on more than simply using bumping services. In most instances it won't be hard to find evidence pointing to a scam -- its good to buffer a rating with additional evidence.

It seems to me that any DT contributor would agree with me that posting only one link to the ANN can only help promote your own thread. In addition, I noticed that you are adding quite a few threads to the list, (no archives, and not flagging OP accounts to protect other users). In your opinion, can DT tag them, relying only on your word?

Also, you can always report a violation to the moderators. There are example's when moderators deleted threads even with 100,000 views. Below I gave an example of how such reports might look, (If you need help creating reports like this, let me know).

Two new threads have been added to the list:

72. 【ANN】JBOXCOIN - JBOX - Listed 2 Exchange and Airdrop is Live
Announcement thread has been created by a known shill account more than a month ago , but they didn't start with their "work" up until 2 weeks ago, when they realized that thread is not getting attention or traction so they decided to "spice it up" . Accounts used are also (or they were) active in few other threads that are already on the list, like Fetch.ai, ZYX, tap etc.


73. AMEPAY is a fast and secure cryptocurrency-based payments alternative
I've noticed Amepay and suspicious behaviour in their announcement thread some time ago, but somehow I forgot to include them in this list and now it's time to sort that out. Accounts used are also  active ins everal similar threads, like Uncommon, Monolith, IOOX..

Hey @notblox1, first sorry for the late reply, somehow I missed your post.

Regarding Free2ex exchange, you are right, they indeed hired bumping service to promote their announcement thread as accounts use are active on several other threads, doing the same "work" so I added them on the list. Since they only started, If you have some free time, it wouldn't be bad idea to report those posts, they are basically just one-liners and will be deleted  if reported to mods.

---

That's not all for today, there is another addition

Uncommonn is a platform connecting vendors and customers 
Uncommon recently started thier IEO on Vindax (home of many dodgy IEOs) so they decided to spice up their announcement thread with fake conversations and hype. "Marketing agency" that is doing that for them is not very smart as some of the accounts used are already tagged for the same thing, so what they are actually doing is bringing negative attention to Uncommon.

@Rikafip please consider checking and adding this topic for Free2ex exchange.
It appears they just started using bumping services, same as for Simba and similar topics.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/free2ex-is-a-legally-regulated-european-cryptocurrency-platform-5262757

One more project that is using bumping service in order to promote thier announcement thread has been added to the list!

Fetch.ai and Bitfinex announce trading competition and catalyst sale
Fetch.ai has been going on for quite some time, since 2018, so it is not a new and inexperienced project, and they are even listed on some known reputable exchanges like Binance and Bitfinex. With that being said, I must say that i was surprised to see them opting for this kind of dodgy prmotion, where they hired one of those "marketing agencies" as they like to call themselves in order to promote their trading competition and another sale, instead going for some bounty or signature campaign as most of other legit projects do.

Accounts that have been used for bumping Fetch.ai are working on several others threads that are already on the list, like DSF and PayAccept. What people from Fetch.ai (and quite a lot of others from the list) probably don't understand  is that such services don't really care what they promote as long as they get paid, so they will gladly promote scam projecs too, and that can indirectly affect Fetch.ai.

Latest addition to the list:

[ANN][Exchange] Unitrade - a DeFi Exchange Platform
As the name says, Unitrade is DeFi platform, build on top of currently very popular Uniswap. They are already trading on several exchanges, but they felt the need to hire one of those bumping services to hype the project further, like there is not enough hype going on around anything defi related. Accounts working on Unitrade are also active on Largo Coin ANN, doing the exactly the same thing.

They made so many spam comments in only two weeks, mostly from newbie accounts, and now they have 13 pages of that shit in self-moderated topic.
Nobody should trust exchange like this, especially if you see their website and something like this mixed russian/english language:
https://posbit.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/63000135362-kyc-aml

Same members bumping PosBit are also bumping Payccept.