Another Wild Ride Down Plagiarism Lane

I was going through the new posts this morning and this account caught my attention: 'bitukoyo'. Not tagging him/her intentionally. It is a relatively new account, around 10 days old and they seem to be targeting POB and LEO mainly.

Case 1: Some motivational speaker in Bangladesh off Facebook

Here is the post: @bitukoyo/some-hard-truth-in-life

Screenshot in case anything gets changed:
image.png

Here's the link and screenshot for the Facebook post:
https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=2...three%20classes%20of%20people%20can%20never%20survive%20in%20competition%201..%20lazy%2C%202...fool%20%2C3...%20slow&d=5002808187027508&mkt=en-WW&setlang=en-US&w=ESIgg55rUDPjA4PTI_9UdDf17nAN8WVM

image.png

If you notice, the English in their post doesn't make much sense and looks like a bad auto-translate again.

So, at this point I was willing to chalk it up to a new user not knowing that reposting other people's work isn't something that Hive does unlike Reddit or Twitter. Sadly, after going down the rabbit hole a bit more, it doesn't seem to be the case.

Case 2: Plagiarizing off Steemit 1

Looking for more suspicious posts, this one caught my eye:

@bitukoyo/how-to-earn-profit-on-your-cryptocurrencies-via-staking

It is a well written article. Just that it is a lift off a post on Steemit. This seems to be the original article and it is written for a sort of contest that they run there: https://steemit.com/hive-108451/@promo-nigeria/steemit-crypto-academy-s2week7-or-or-how-i-generate-income-on-pancakeswap-or-or-submitted-to-image

Here's the article on POB/LEO:
image.png

Here's the original article on Steemit:
image.png

Well... 'i'm sure this is juicy enough not to miss' like it says at the end. ;)

Case 3: Combining multiple posts off Steemit 2

Ok, so at this point, I still wasn't sure. Maybe 'promo-nigeria' was their account on Steemit and they chose a different name for Hive/LEO/POB? That's always possible isn't it? Case 3 was the final nail in the coffin.

This is their most rewarded post on LEO at least and it was the hardest to track: @bitukoyo/how-to-earn-profit-on-your-cryptocurrencies-via-staking

For the first part, they ripped off a post by anyagladys: https://steemit.com/hive-108451/@anyagladys/crypto-academy-week-15-homework-post-for-professor-imagen

POB/LEO post:

image.png

The original post on Steemit:
image.png

Next, they used screenshots and description from another post by simonnwigwe: https://steemit.com/hive-108451/@simonnwigwe/crypto-academy-week-13-homework-post-for-imagen

POB/LEO post:
image.png

Original Steemit post:
image.png

Notice how even the time and battery percentages line up? What a coincidence!

Another curious thing was that the Steemit post had watermarks. So if these were plagiarised how did the scammer remove them? Photoshop magic?

I don't think it even needed that effort. In the Steemit comments, you can see that the original author had to resubmit his posts because his images weren't watermarked. Looks like our plagiarizer was very quick.


They have combined multiple posts and that to me is an indication that they're the ones plagiarizing and not the other way around. Of course, one possibility remains at least for the Steemit articles, that they're actually multi-accounting and milking the rewards from competitions over there.

There's no good explanation for copying that Bangladeshi influencer.

I do see some votes on their posts from people who are active in the community so just want to remind you guys to keep a look out. Their rewards aren't excessive at this point. Also, I'm pretty sure when there's one, there will be more where they came from.


Posting this because via Ecency because uploading images on the pob front-end doesn't work for me and there are way too many screenshots to upload.

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