@sandrino's 6th Day Sock-Puppet Circle-Jerk
Sandrino aka SanDraino aka ScamDrino
Background of a Scammer
Six Months ago, I came across the account @sandrino because I like to watch surf videos to chill out.
I began to notice that this account was trending daily under the surf/surfing tags.
@sandrino regularly uploaded WSL (World Surf League) videos from Youtube, I thought the content was great but I quickly became suspicious that these videos did not belong to @sandrino, the quality of the video production was totally professional.
It became more apparent that some sort of abuse was happening as @sandrino posted 10+ Youtube videos every single day.
Who was supporting this?
Well that would be @sandrino self-voting these copy and pasta to the top, 10 times a day, everyday.
Last year posting 10 times a day
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Most of the time the embedded WSL Youtube video made up the entire post, however, when there was text it was also copy and pasted directly from the descriptions provided on the WSL YouTube channel.
After asking for opinions from members of the Steemit community, who all agreed this was straight up plaguiarism, I started flagging @sandrino posts.
At first, @sandrino protested the flagging and I said I’d be happy to remove my flags if he could prove (through social media) that he was in fact affiliated with WSL. A tweet or a FB post declaring that WSL had joined Steemit.
@sandrino responded with generic links to the official WSL Facebook page and did the same with the WSL YouTube channel which of course anyone could supply.
Thus, I continued to flag this plagiarism regularly.
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Eventually, @sandrino stopped posting WSL surf videos and moved on to posting Brazilian and Portuguese only content.
It appeared that @sandrino’s scamming had ended.
Fast forward to present day .
At it Again
In the last few weeks, I decided to check up on my old friend @sandrino.
There was nothing new on the account wall, so I wondered if he’d powered down and had a look at his transaction history.
Low and behold @sandrino has been very active upvoting and curating –
A 6th day 11th hour comment farm circle-jerk with multiple accounts
@sandrino is the main account with 70,000+ SP
This account is responsible for the upvoting of multiple asinine comments to, at present, about $8-$12 per / comment in potential rewards daily.
All rewards from comments are funneled back into the @sandrino account by the secondary Sock-Puppet accounts
Sock-Puppet Accounts
@sergioss: reputation 61, total all time posts 4 (3 in the last 72hrs)
@claudialoureiro: reputation 65, total all time posts 4 (3 in the last 72hrs)
@thorsss: reputation 61, total all time posts 4 (3 in the last 72hrs)
Right away, these accounts are suspect as they have made a total of 1 post before last week.
- This is a red flag for comment farming, since the accounts miraculously have 60+ reps.
- They must be making some pretty amazing comments, right
-Clearly these accounts exist for a single purpose. Shit Comments.
Once I discovered these accounts, I had a look at the amazing amount of shit comments produced by these accounts every single day upvoted to $8-10$ each by @sandrino.
Expanding Circle Jerk
Unfortunately, as I began to flag these accounts and later reported this scam to Steem Abuse in Steem.chat - MORE sock-puppet accounts have been added or joined in the activities.
@sandrinos (with an s)
@flavioss
@brunass
@maristeem
A taste of the quality comments @sandrino loves so much
Coming Full Circle(Jerk)
@worldsurf
It seems as though Scamdrino hasn’t given up on Copy and Pasting WSL YouTube videos.
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Rewards Are Funneled Back to Main Account
Most of the time rewards are transfered back to @sandrino the main account responsible for upvoting this nonsense.
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Flags
My flags of these posts have returned hundreds of steem and SBd back to the rewards pool, but as the situation escalates and the number of Sock-Puppet accounts grows, I believe that it’ll become increasingly difficult to contain all on my own.
I’m making this post as I believe the community should be aware of this scam.
I haven’t commented directly to @sandrino as I feel this is blatantly obvious abuse and from past experience I believe I will not receive any honest answers.
I’ll be leaving an update at Steem abuse in Steemchat to let them know about the newest sock-puppet accounts and in the meantime I'm going to continue flagging this shit.
If you want to join me, I 'd appreciate your support to help bring this abuse to an end.
Cheers, V
Edit: Image credits
njfamily.com
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Great post man! I am from the brazilian community in steemit and we take the quality of posts very seriously, I am part of the @brazilians project. No doubt the presence of @sandrino in the network is a bizarre thing, it is considered the only major whale in the Brazilian community, however, it simply never came into contact with any member, it is like an autistic, lives alone self-voting and any attempt of contact is in vain. This type of comment voted by itself is very discouraging for small users, this guy could be doing a lot for the community and growing up together, will figure this out the hard way.
greetings from Brasil!
Thank you @thomashblum, I really appreciate hearing from someone else in the community.
I'm of the opinion that we all succeed on this platform by working together, through mutual support and by contributing quality content. It's certainly frustrating when people who are in a position to assist others and give back are instead preoccupied with their own short term profits.
I'm not surprised by your description of sandrino as I've looked into this account's voting history and see nothing but self-votes across the board.
It's really pathetic, it's just page after page of self-voting of all the accounts named in this post. You can scroll and scroll through the history and Not find a SINGLE vote for anyone outside of his circle.
Your community deserves better.
Are you in the MSP team-brasil channel?
I'm often hanging out in the discord server, come say hi in the truth-consp-politics channel or DM me. I'd love some help finding some good content to curate from team brasil. Cheers!
Sure man! Maybe this post change mind of Sandrino... But i cant expect anything. Thanks for the answer. I follow you by now. Im on the PAL comunity of MSP, i go right now search you on discord! Thanks!
We are talking about a person who since he joined Steemit has never ever upvoted anybody else than himself, who doesn't care at all about communication with others or the platform as a whole.
I wish you good luck that he may change his mind, but to be honest I just can't believe it. Now he and his socket puppet accounts just started to flag @v4vapid.
I exposed @berniesanders for what he really is in my posts.
Just take a look at any of my posts (which I HAD to spam constantly to drain his VP and also to get the exposure I needed) and you can see just how far the abuse goes by @berniesanders.
He even got lazy at one point in making alternate accounts to abuse with and made "nextgen-InsertNumberHere-" accounts!
Please, do your due dilligence and check out, not only my posts, but his steemd track record on upvotes/downvotes. He's got many many more accounts than just the ones I've found, I'm sure, but those were only the ones that I could PROVE were his beyond a shadow of a doubt (based on voting/downvoting patterns, delegations, transactions, etc!)!
The real abuser here is the one who cries "ABUSE!!" the most, it is, none other than the inbred, cousin-fucker, that is, @berniesanders! :))
Here's a link to one of my latest posts, showing @berniesanders' alternate account list! I believe it's STILL growing.. which is sad.. He truly is a sociopathic dipshit! Let's take this fucking piece of shit out, together! :)
Great work V.
Sadly the platform is becoming worse with more of this behaviour prevalent now. I just wish those who use big flags to censor legitimate content with petty opinion flagging would step up and join the cause to stop the reward pool abuse.
You’re a top man dude.
Good eye bud, this shit is spreading like wild fire, we need to all step up our game or its going to get out of control. This is just one case, but I have a feeling there are many other sock puppet scams going on undetected. We really need some action from @ned and the big boys to stop this. I understand our witnesses need to get paid but how about 10-20 steem per day going to those who help clean up the abuse? A whole lot more needs to be done to stop this shit from happening. I just went on a rant myself on how shitty things are getting. Hopefully change is coming
Hi @v4vapid we have worked with others to combat this manner of abuse using out flag rewards system and we would be happy to do it again.
I know @troglodactyl would likely be willing to help concerning this matter. We actually them a bunch for helping with a similar last comment spam ring uncovered after being clued into the last minute voting by @abusereports. This abuse and response is documented here.
https://steemit.com/abuse/@anthonyadavisii/comment-spammers-getting-ready-to-payout-you-know-what-to-do-flag-these-shitbirds-95a8e824031c7
If you would like, we can start a campaign against this ring and take into account all your rshares contributed thus far for ranking and rewards. By starting a campaign like this l, we will post until it is closed and liquid rewards are distributed to abuse fighters in accordance with their rshares.
Let me know your thoughts moving forward. Here is the Discord we use for coordination of flag rewards campaigns if you are interested.
https://discord.gg/RncsyJ
Thanks for the info and the links. I'll have a look at this when i get a chance. Cheers
How can we all organize and fight the good fight for steemit.
It seems that most of the people here that care about the platform want to tackle the abuse. Unless we can organize and reward good post and flag bad post collectively were swimming against the stream. There are many small plankton like myself that would love to get involved but even the wrong comment or post causes us great harm.
What can a plankton like myself do to help with these issues? I would love to hear your feedback on that.
As well thanks for all you do to make steemit a better place!
I would also say you have quite a few spam commenters on this post that should be flagged into submission.
Nice work removing all of those potential rewards V! Thank you so much for finding this jerk and continuing to check up on him :) Hopefully @abusereports can help you FINISH HIM!!
thanks @lyndsaybowes! I know there's some bigger fish to fry out there. It's just amazing how persistent these scammers are.
It all matters, big scams and little scams. If we ignore any of it, and make it easy on them, there will be exponentially more scammers joining the site knowing it's a simple way to make a quick buck. Or a quick million!
This is cool, man. You set the example for other Steemians, hopefully they will follow your lead.
I am very new here. I understand what you are saying is that not only is it possible to "game the system" here, this person is successfully doing it. This seems to me to be a loophole that somehow needs automatic plugging if that's the case. As this platform continues to grow, it seems that depending on the community to somehow try to dig out these abuses and verify them as such is not really tenable.
Also, according to your post, I think I must be a bit confused about plagiarism here as well. I have posted YouTube videos here (that are not mine) with just a few words of comment. I shared these videos because I like the videos. I've made no claim of owning them. So is this considered plagiarism here? I do the same on FB all the time as does everyone else, so I'm confused how that's different here. The YouTuber still gets paid for the advertising regardless of where the video is ultimately viewed, right?
The reward curve shouldn't start linear ...
I wrote an article about that some time ago:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@jaki01/conciliation-of-the-reward-curves-die-versoehnung-der-reward-kurven
If the system is possible to game or cheat, people are going to figure it out, and game the shit out of it. I'm not a betting man, but I'd bet some big dollars on that being the reality of things.
Great work here V .. unfortunately, the sharks are circling but hopefully with a group effort we can avert a feeding frenzy that in the longterm will leave us all hungry :(
This is truly "vapid" work. I applaud your efforts, though my cynicism in the face of open, widespread vote selling makes me wonder how much of an edge this guy even gets by upvoting himself directly rather than simply selling it on the market.
Your value to the network may be wasted on such a menial task =/ I'd rather see you able to do almost anything else but following wallet transfers around respelling of a screen-name.
PS - Pete and Pete. Yeah.
Yeah, I would also like to spend my time being more productive. I 100% prefer curating and upvoting the best content i can find.
I hear ya on the cynicism, there's way too much of this going on all around us.
Idk I just saw what was going on and my natural curiosity led me to this ring of bullshit. I also just want to put it out there and make it known.
PS what's Pete and Pete?
Edit - I gotcha - the GIF ;)
I wish I knew the answer to this. That was one of the things I wanted to do with CommentWealth - flag spam comments so minnows (or really anyone) wouldn't have to get involved, but it was a manual thing that became too time-consuming. And then we all had to remove our delegations, so the account can't flag with teeth anymore. I still think having an account that's not trying to build a following making the flags is helpful to the community so they don't have to put their reputation on the line, and having more than one steemcleaners-type account - I can envision several of these that rumble around the platform scrubbing off abuse. Maybe someday, in a perfect world...