I started this year on a high note: Getting my last post curated by @curangel & upvoted by @appreciator

...And then it went to a low note: Getting blacklisted by @steemcleaners

Well, alright then, let's walk through what happened:

Waking Up To A Ban 👨‍⚖️

I wrote up that last post talking about my love for Steem & my plans to fully embrace it in 2020. I wrote it just before going to bed ( a strategy I usually do with my posts, otherwise I'd be constantly refreshing the page, glued to the screen lol ). When I woke up in the morning to check on any updates, I saw SteemCleaners saying I was banned due to identity theft.

Yeah... I was pretty fucking confused.

Identity Thievery 📛

Initially, I figured this may have been a simple mistake, thinking that I was impersonating myself. No problem, it's easy enough to make a tweet or update my website to prove I am who I am. So I hopped into the SteemCleaners discord channel, and asked for more info:

After waiting for quite some time for someone on the team to get online, I finally was told what was going on. But, as you can see, I was utterly confused:

@the-onion, An Obviously Fake & Content-Stealing Account 🧅

For those who don't know, there's a site called The Onion which is a satirical-news site. Not fake news as in misinformation to support an agenda, but rather a simple parody to poke fun at our real world craziness.

But, @the-onion is NOT the real Onion people. It's pretty clear to see judging by the fact that:

• A) It has nearly no money invested into it
• B) There are no mentions of them joining Steem on any of their social medias or websites

Also, we can see who created this account, but I'll touch on that in a moment. Back to discord I was about to quickly find out, SteemCleaners doesn't deal kindly with abusers:

Ok... Hold on... I'm even more confused now than I was before!

The Falsehoods Of @wikitruth 🤫

Here's where things get weird, as if they weren't already. @wikitruth created @the-onion. Thanks to the Steem blockchain, this is easily figured out:

Ok, so @wikitruth, a weird "the media is lying to you" type of content, then went on to create @the-onion, stealing content written by someone else in a blatant attempt to profit from plagiarism.

...But what does that have to do with me?

The Binance Blunder 💱

When I was shown these screenshots, which are transfers from my account to Binance's @deepcrypto8 account, I wasn't quite sure what they had to do with anything. I wasn't looking close enough, was the issue.

Yup, so in @wikitruth's memo, there was my Binance account number... WTF IS GOING ON?

Time for Spencer to do some sleuthing... 🕵️

Things Aren't So Okie-Dokie, Boi 👌

Let's take a close look at that fake @the-onion account, shall we?

Well now, who the hell is this? Why is @okiedokieboi sending STEEM to a relatively new account, an account which is clearly fake?

Ok then, who created @okiedokieboi?

I instantly knew that emrebeyler is innocent here. He runs the Infestor account creation service, so clearly he is just getting wrapped up into all of this, like myself.

Speaking of Infestor... I've used that service to give out free accounts before, let's just take a peek at my code history:

Hmm... codes were claimed at April 10th, and April 11th... Where have I seen those dates before?

@okiedokieboi	@wikitruth

Again: you have to be an idiot to think you can get away with this shit on a public ledger.

So, now let's figure out who I gave this code to. I went through my, relatively short, list of accounts I helped create, and quickly came to a suspect.

Talking about Steem On Anonymous Image-Boards... Maybe Not The Most Ideal Plan 👎

Early last year, I was on a 4chan-like image board (forgot the name of it, I visit random ones a lot because I like the format), and I was talking about Steem. Someone seemed interested in joining, so I had them message me on Twitter, and through our DMs, I sent him some Infestor gift codes for him & a friend to make an account.

Corroborating the dates seen above, and our Twitter DM timestamps, I can confirm that the person I was talking to is @okiedokieboi, and hes used the second gift code I gave him to create @wikitruth.

But, we are still left with something rather odd... Why did @wikitruth send STEEM to my Binance account?

A Misunderstanding ❓, A Mistake ❌, And A Memo 🔖

One day, this person messaged me on Twitter asking for help with exchanging STEEM to BTC. I kindly explained to him how to do so using Binance, as that was the method I used. And, since I was actually just doing that very thing when he asked (well, actually the day after, but that was when I saw the message), I was able to help walk him through it step by step.

However, he misunderstood what I was telling him, and I believe he put in my account number by mistake, not realizing the screenshot I sent him was just an example, and not to copy my number for his memo.

So, as I'm sure you can see, I'm feeling confident at this point that I was able to uncover what this whole mess was. I decided to try & get @okiedokieboi on discord to talk with him about it:

Instead, he wanted to talk in the comments on my recent post:

At this point, I realized that his account was too low on RCs to continue commenting. So, I ended that conversation and brought my findings to the SteemCleaners discord channel.

After basically explaining everything I just told all of you, they lifted the ban, and took me & my other accounts off the blacklist. They haven't removed the downvotes they gave me, but seeing as how they didn't really affect me all that much, I'm just happy to call this whole mess over with.

SteemCleaners Doesn't Take No Shit 💩

Let this be a lesson to all of you: If you do some dumb shit, @steemcleaners is going to make sure you have a bad time. They are extremely dedicated and are able to see everything. They represent the extreme disdain for bad actors on this platform 👍

I'm just lucky I was able to figure out this whole thing and clear my name, otherwise that would've been a really shitty start to the new year X^D

A Silver Lining On The Mountain Peak... 🏔️

Getting falsely accused & blacklisted wasn't all bad... Because I may just be the only actually innocent person to be put on that spaminator list, I was able to find a bug with the @steempeak frontend UI, and I promptly reported it to their discord to help get it fixed.

So, at least some good came from all of this lol

In The End, I'm just Happy To See My Normal Profile Again :^)

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