About a week ago, @JacKeown posted a thread titled Steemit-Trail Conspiracy?! which discusses a large number of upvotes and high curation rewards very quickly. In the comments, we discussed the ability to use a large number of bots to 'promote' a post as a service. 

I finally had a moment of free time and my curiosity had already started to eat at me. Blockchain forensics is nothing THAT new, but I still have yet to take the time to learn more about it. @JacKeown made some really good observations, and his post is worth reading. I decided to take this as an opportunity to play around with steem forensics. 

The code below tracks who has sent payments to and received payments from the specified account.

https://pastebin.com/836xjjzA

To run the script, save it as script.py, and run it with python3 and the account name to analyze. No keys required.

python3 script.py pwnedu

The script is simple. The hardest part was (is still) getting to know the API. I wanted a tool that would help me analyze steem transactions so I could get a better understanding of how the curation trails were happening and who was receiving the funds.

If there is an interest in this script, I will share the improvements as I implement them.