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The amazing thing is that the 18,229 is far more than that. I shared another 18,150 with the Steem team over the weekend and there are still more. It's crazy how many accounts they've created and I don't understand how they've done managed to do it with the 15SP delegation. Any ideas?

No idea how they did it. I've never taken the time to look at the faucet code or understand how it works. I checked creation dates on about 40 voters. Some were created in December, some were created in October, and the others were all created in June. So, two thoughts:

  1. Whoever it is has been at this for a while
  2. It might be interesting to look at creation dates of the whole set in order to see if they were created in clusters or spread out over time. If they were created in bursts, monitoring could be established. If they were created in a long steady flow, that would be harder to watch for.

Interestingly, I got the accounts from 3 different posts, and all of the accounts voting on each post were created during the same month (i.e post 1 had 10 voters from December, post 2 had 20 from June, and post 3 had 10 from October).

I'm hopeful that whatever weakness they took advantage of has been plugged but only time will tell. What I also found interesting was that the accounts they're voting on were all created in January 2018 and similar to what you say, a voting account only appears to vote for one user (presumably through fear of getting caught and "silo"ing their losses.

It's clever and although not the most profitable scam I've seen, the revenues could have increased exponentially.

I've caught a few of these voting "rings" in the past and I wonder if after chopping off one head, 3 more appeared.

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