Steemit Defense League is the creation of @camillesteemer after being flagged for spam and plagiarism. He decided to create accounts abusing Steemit Inc sign up delegation to flag anyone who flagged him. Over time the flags started to target anyone who supported those who flagged him and eventually just randomly targeting anyone and everyone.
While the flags are meaningless at only 1/10th of a cent, they have confused, frustrated, and disheartened a lot of Steemians.
Recently @camillesteemer started to target specific accounts with their username and branding to make users feel they were being flagged by them adding to the confusion. Latest attempts have used sexually suggestive user profiles to flag people.
The Steemit Defense League consists of 161 known accounts used to maliciously flag individuals causing as much chaos as possible with zero invested stake. They do this by abusing the Steemit Inc faucet (sign up process) which gives 15 Steem Power delegation to new accounts.
The new Steemit Defense League
So far the Steemit Defense League has had two phases.
The first phase they have flagged anyone who has flagged them in the past or supported anti-abuse projects and then ultimately random users.
The second phase they started to create targeted accounts pretending to be well-known users to cause even more confusion and frustration. The goal with this is to shift the blame for the flags to another individual. This has been done for many users, including my own account.
The Steemit Defense League has now shifted into what I call phase three. This phase they have shifted from flagging users to upvoting them and masquerading as a vote bot in an attempt to steal Steem.
Fake bid bots
This is even more dangerous and difficult to deal with. They are still flagging with over 100 accounts, all of which have around 0.100 Steem Power. They have added 28 new accounts in the last few days in an attempt to fool users to send 1-2.5 Steem.
They also have moved from manually voting to using @steemauto to automate a lot of their activity across 161+ accounts.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done in this situation but to inform users. They do not post, they do not comment, nothing can be done to change their reputation. You cannot disable an account, and you cannot hide an account. While they continue to create new accounts abusing the Steemit Inc faucet, this will continue to be a problem.
Steemit Defense League Status
28 accounts lost their delegation today in the latest update to shut down @camillesteemer troll train. This attempt has the potential to do a lot more harm than their 1/10th cent dust flags. Legitimate losers can lose real money in this latest shift in direction. All 161 one accounts have had their delegation removed.
@johngreenfield
