Topic: @theymos.Fake conversations becoming a serious issue. (Read 714 times)

Damn right... I'm on my second beverage and still haven't made sense of it but I'm sure it's great: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bumping-changes-on-some-boards-5183553

Apply Occam's razor to all but this (and the "upcoming") forum.

There's always an easy solution stuck in the sands of common sense, but it may be buried under the waves of entropy.

Fake conversation detected on this scam Ethereum Classic Atlantis ann:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/annairdropethereum-classic-atlantis-etcaairdrop-for-etc-holders-5182187

Posted on scam accusations:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/scam-ethereum-classic-atlantis-fakedrop-5183449

The fact that this hasn't been implemented might mean it's not that simple to implement on SMF.

I agree with that 100%
and I also think you will see some 'member right foundation' comments,
and how that is violation of their freedom etc...
 

Newbies/Jr. Members' posts should not bump a thread back to the top.
Users with ranks higher than the above should be able to bump a thread N times per 24h based on some arbitrary criterion (e.g. merit, activity)

Slowly but surely I'm giving up also.
In my case, I also don't even have the time to browse all the topics I would like to read so I only target lately topics opened in the wrong sections or pure garbage ones.

Waging war against is those farms is close to a Sisyphean task or a battle with the hydra, as long as there are stupid "dev teams" or whatever paying for this garbage there will be hundreds of posts and threads bumped.
Probably they will only stop when they realize their topic bumps are not helping the "project" at all.

Check my friends from ECOS for example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5156577.320

Probably they paid for two months of bumping, the pyramides quotes stopped on the 1 and there is no single legit user posting anything in 10 days 
Checking some of them it seems they are unemployed for the time being 

Thank you for the comments Loyce

I think it is my persistence in posting many times to counter the scam post that maybe raised a few eyebrows of suspicion towards me.

As for those that know me, I do not get paid for bumping threads however I did receive two very kind donations from users who I helped during their fight when they were scammed. One fortunately receive all of his funds back and he made a donation to many people that helped in his thread, even after I declined to receive it he insisted to send it. The other, unfortunately is still waiting for his funds to be returned but insisted on sending me a donation and I accepted.

Apart from those two donations received which were as a thank you for helping in their fight, I have never been paid to do anything and if I was offered money to bump threads I would decline and report the user.



Many thanks for the comment DireWolfM14

I completely agree with you. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. In future I would probably not post so often in a scam thread and rather post a few times here and there to highlight it as a scam (or potential scam) and just report it.

Maybe posting in the scam threads can be seen as counter-productive especially if sock-puppets pounce and start "conversations" and "debates" and try to legitimise their scam, therefore I will change my approach. I appreciate the comments.



Thank you for the post marlboroza

I was and still am grateful for the advice you gave me when I needed help. You have my total respect.

Yes my methods might be somewhat strange or unorthodox but I have taken on-board the comments in this thread and will change the way I try to expose scammers.

Regarding the army of shills episode you mentioned, the same technique is commonly applied by so many scammers. The forum is full of "projects" that claim to be genuine but have a team of sock-puppets.

In the case of coinsbit they ensured none of the sock-puppets posted in the p2pb2b thread because it would arouse suspicion of a connection even though they denied it, investigations showed enough evidence to give way beyond reasonable doubt that the two projects were owned by the same team. Both websites became super-active in this forum around December 2018 as soon as IEOs started being the chosen method of making money.

There are several other projects out there that have hired or own sock-puppets to attack anybody that asks questions, one example is in the Bankera/Spectrocoin threads.



Thank you for the post iasenko.

I can understand where the hypothesis would come from and I have decided to modify my approach from now on.

I think fighting the scammers with regular counter posting does inadvertently bump the thread and it is something that needs to stop.

The scammers and spammers will be reported as and when I see them, that is a far better approach to help clean up this forum and protect it from the modern day thieves that have infested it.



Thank you for the comments tmfp

This made me laugh. Your advice seems to be a cross between something Master Yoda would say and a Chinese proverb spoken by an old wise man

I think it is important to expose the scams and scammers but there is a way to do it and I certainly will not wrestle with those scammers again. I will report them and see what happens.

As for the perceived lack of action by the forum owners/moderators - if it is as simple as allowing spammers and scammers to operate here with almost impunity just because of the traffic flow then that would be a very sad conclusion to the situation. I feel there may be more to it than that.

I prefer to believe the forum will put a stop to the spammers and scammers because those thousands of spam posts being made on a weekly basis which are clearly designed for the sole purpose to fool (investors, newbies and gullible) people - must be stopped otherwise it is true the credibility of this forum will be on the line and community cannot allow that to happen.



The good news about coinsbit is that the thread has been removed from the forum but their other scam thread (p2pb2b) is still there.

Hopefully that too will be shut down soon.

I got sick of it the cheesy thread bumper army being deployed by this company, so I started tagging them for scam promotion (as it turns out a couple of projects they were hired by were indeed scams, as probably are most others who hire them), and lo and behold, they stopped posting with them. And started posting under other accounts. I haven't checked up on them recently but my policy is any time I see one of their accounts with a post county above 40, I tag it.

The weirdest part is, they don't create new accounts. They bought a batch of 200 or so with little-to-no activity and creation dates between 2012 and 2018.

At least a couple projects have fired them probably over my making a regular stink about it. Spammers-for-hire just annoy me.

I would like to mention this ann thread too which have a same position... https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.52395669

Lot of spam going on their. So many newbies accounts making low quality post their and I wonder that OP of that thread is the staff member on this forum.

Yet they consider a spam opening new general topic in Local forum...
where is the logic there I wonder ?

Talking more about it seems futile and energy wasting

I gave up reporting this type of abuse a while ago. Sometimes I noticed that between making the report and it being actioned, pages of further crap had been posted.
On some threads where I think there is a risk of a very questionable scheme's bumping service actually succeeding in boosting credibility, I periodically post summaries of the spam and a warning about it, but rarely go to the lengths that JollyGood has on the basis that

Never wrestle with a pig.
You get covered in shit and the pig enjoys it.


This.

If the senior management of the forum doesn't consider the thousands upon thousands of spam posts being made (solely to distort visitors' perception of the popularity of usually dubious schemes) to be a threat to the forum's credibility, then this conclusion seems inevitable

The risk of doing this is that it can be abused to lock a competitor's thread. It's virtually impossible to prove OP is the one who hired the bumping "service".

Thanks, I've tried that as well but my report was marked as good but the thread is still open, so I decided to focus on the spammers instead because I see no other option.

If they are not reporting spam they are very likely using bumping service. It doesn't need to be trashed, just locked for few days. If "they do it again", it can always be locked for more days and this would make payed bump services pointless.

It can be done like this:

1) report thread which you suspect it is being bumped by "fake" accounts
2) don't report spam accounts
3) let moderator do the rest of the job

If they continue doing so - trash it. Less work for everyone.

If everything was that easy... I would love to get it trashed but you need a proof that those accounts are really connected to the service otherwise you are just shooting in the dark.

Just nuke the thread and be done with it.

If you have time to spend you may also want to look at those accounts.

They were old account bumper to create fake conversations, some of them can be now banned or sold.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.31554397

This looks like something from Sci-Fi movies...   
and even if I would like to see this integrated in forum, I don't think it is probable.
People are slow in making changes, and forums even slower.

I do not accuse him because I didn't have time to look at his post history but referring to his positive trust ratings I assumed he was from the "good side". I didn't reported any oh his posts. But again 200+ posts in this thread is a bit suspicious even though he has a positive trust rating.
My other assumption was if the spammers/bumpers have  one "good" account just to fight with and make kind of legit bumps. This should not be the case with JollyGood just that's where I got the idea from.