(Opened initially this on Reputation with the idea most "Merit/alts investigators" would be in there but turn out they may be actually in here as well, if you are an Investigator, i suggest you read this, it may make your work easier)
Hi,
i had made this tool visualization of the Merit Network to find merit sources:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/interact-explore-the-merit-network-4584759But actually found out it may be good to find abusers as well. This visualization show the merit connections happened between users and in one of these version i marked also the red trust level for each user:
In here you can see who was red trusted(red), who is not(azure) and who is trusted (green)
Updated to Sunday 1st of JulyLink to the tool below:
https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Network-Visualization/?config=config_Trust.json
Now if you move along the peripheral area of this circle you see in the picture, you will notice a lot of points (users) isolated from the rest,
these could be transactions happened between alts or abuse in general(some in fact were already spotted as you can see):
Example 1:
Example 2:
If anybody has the time and will to go through these would be quite convenient as you can see immediately:
- Suspicius exchanges of merits between users
- If the user was already red trusted
- If any people he had some exchange was red trusted
- Clicking on the node you get information about rank - merit sent and received in general
If you have any questions ask.
More over: when you have identified some person of interest, you can use this other tool to output a list of the merit transactions with clickable links to the user profiles and message merited in the forum
Go here:
https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Explorer-SQL/You can specify in the last line the name of the user you want to search for ( in this example theymos)
WHERE UserData.Username like "theymos"
paste this in the box to see the merit sent from the user
paste this in the box to see the merit received from theymos
One real case research examplei went here:
https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Network-Visualizationand found this user
hrbt:
then go to see the same in here:
https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Network-Visualization/?config=config_Trust.json
Run this query in here:
https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Explorer-SQL/SELECT
date,
'https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=' || fromid,
'https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=' || toid,
merit,
'https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=' || msg || '#' || substr(msg,instr(msg,'.')+1)
FROM meritdata
Inner Join UserData on UserData.userid = meritdata.fromid
WHERE UserData.Username like "hrbt"
Result, i display the links of: who sent, who received and a link to the message merited:
Done, the situation in here is pretty clear.
