Is somebody stealing votes?...Why are so many accounts upvoting the same weird content?!

This is a repost because the last post got very little attention...and I think that people need to know this...

So...my brother, @mckeown12 saw @worldofmusic's introduceyourself post and then responded to another of his posts. He noticed that this BRAND NEW ACCOUNT got $80+ for each of his first 3 posts...despite the fact that they have barely any views...so we decided to investigate a bit...we looked at who was upvoting when using https://steemd.com...

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...And we noticed that the same accounts upvote together on lots and lots of posts...and that they seem to all be responding to @trail...

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@worldofmusic posted 1 day ago...

@trail upvoted...along with EVERYBODY else...

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It's not just these posts either...here's another example from a post by a completely different account! ( @gaming-stuff )

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So...WTF?! The upvotes all flood in as soon as @trail upvotes?! Why does this happen?! Are people paying to get upvoted by @trail and company?...and WHY are so many accounts just blindly giving away their votes to follow the example of @trail? I'm familiar with the steem-trail idea and this seems related to it...Is steem-trail super sketchy?...I've had good experiences with @rycharde and @math-trail ...but I've seen other posts criticizing it...

Thoughts?