A couple weeks ago, I posted a controversial piece about a certain whale who had been gaming the system, possibly with the help of a few of his whale buddies.

There was a lot of activity on the RocketChat, as he floundered to explain his early support of @msgivings, a well known account whose plagiarism was exposed. Eventually, after nearly two hours of simply claiming no knowledge of his early votes on @msgivings posts, he made a claim which was vaguely plausible but not disprovable at the time... I was forced to redact my post.

Oddly enough, the plagiarism which was to become @msgivings downfall was published after the account had attracted vocal suspicions from Steemit users.

It seems that the perpetrators of this sort of fraud are plagued with hubris. They think they are made of Teflon (tm). But in the end, the truth has a way of revealing itself.

What follows is my original post, which I was forced to delete. I've since become convinced that my orginal accusations were indeed well placed. His story doesn't add up. Additional evidence has been gathered which draw out a pattern of collusive activity designed to extract liquid rewards from the platform.

As a bit of a teaser, I've included one such piece of evidence at the end of this post... But without further delay, this is the full text of my deleted post.

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In my previous post, I asked whether @msgivings was a sock puppet. It was clear that something wasn't right about the account and its content. And as it turns out, my suspicions were vindicated when the account was flagged into oblivion for plagiarism and fraud.

As of this writing, @msgiving's recent post was flagged an impressive 109 times!

Way to go, @msgivings!

(image courtesy of pixabay)

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The Battle Against Sock Puppets Rages On

Enter @honeyscribe and @lifeisawesome:

@lifeisawesome

@honeyscribe

Two other accounts created about two weeks ago who immediately found consistent spectacular results!

(image courtesy of pixabay)

If they are sock puppets, who is responsible?

In my post about @msgivings, I hinted at a possible suspect...

@kushed voted on both of @msgivings first two posts, within two minutes of their creation.

And it turns out, their fingerprints are on these sock puppets as well...

The account @lakers created both @honeyscribe and @lifeisawesome, and began upvoting their posts....

The @lakers account was mined using the same active key as another account, @salus.

Both @salus and @kushed withdrew funds to the same Bittrex account:

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Stop Witness Voting For @kushed

Head on over to https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Find @kushed's name on the witness list.

If it looks like this:

Make it look like this:

If you weren't voting for @kushed to begin with, you can accomplish the same thing by voting for a bunch of the other witnesses... Have fun with it!

Thanks for doing your part!

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After I posted, @kushed showed up in chat and struggled to respond, for over two hours... eventually, he presented the following explanation for the two sock puppet accounts that I had identified in my post.

I redacted my post, because the claim was so bizarre that I was unprepared to disprove it. I didn't buy it, but I knew in the moment that I had to back off... At the time, there were several whales present and thus a lot of pressure to either "put up or shut up." So.. I shut up.

But, then @lifeisawesome made a funny comment...

Surely a "Huffington Post writer" would realize that Huffington Post's reach is still far greater than Steemit's. It's clear that @kushed was being dishonest, in order to save his own ass and keep the money flowing.

Even if it were true, I see little benefit to the platform by bringing over sub-par writers just because they blogged on some other platform (Huffington Post has well over 100k unpaid bloggers). The quality of the posts is certainly not going to benefit the platform, and the secrecy involved would provide no marketing benefit...

That being said, I don't believe it was true in any meaningful sense. And myself and others have set forth to document a pattern of suspicious activity which will be unveiled in the following days. So far, implicated accounts have drained the reward pool of over $70k at a time where the price of Steem is declining and legitimate authors are unable to make any money at all.

You might want to stock up on popcorn.

Watch this space. ;)