Huh? Upsurge in new followers: fake accounts?

in #steemit6 years ago

What's going on? I noticed a strange upsurge in new followers recently. They'd come in in batches and all share a few common characteristics:

  • They have no profile picture
  • They joined within the last three months
  • They each follow about 28 thousand profiles (curious!)
  • They each have around 1 thousand followers already
  • They all have 100% voting power and $0 vote value
  • They haven't left any comment, ever
  • They seem to only post videos


Here's a screenshot (from busy.org) of the most recent batch:
capture-steemit-followers-1.JPG



and a screenshot of a typical profile page:
capture-steemit-followers-2.JPG



Here are a bunch more profile screenshots to show the similarities:

capture-steemit-followers-3.JPG

capture-steemit-followers-4.JPG

capture-steemit-followers-5.JPG

capture-steemit-followers-6.JPG

capture-steemit-followers-7.JPG

capture-steemit-followers-8.JPG


Here's a screenshot of an earlier batch of followers:
capture-steemit-followers-9.JPG


With more familiar looking profile page examples:

capture-steemit-followers-10.JPG


and

capture-steemit-followers-11.JPG



And yet another batch of "followers":

capture-steemit-followers-13.JPG
capture-steemit-followers-14.JPG


Have you noticed the same? What's up with this? Are these fake accounts? These kind of "followers" have no value.

Tagging @steemcleaners and @spaminator.


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I get a lot of those...

Given that my post triggered more responses than usual, it must be a common issue :(

I have them too, and they come indeed in batches. I bet you from the over 2000 followers I have, maybe 25 % are true real life people, the rest is just bots triggered by whales... It's a shame, but it is a fact!

Yeah, makes me wonder also how many of my followers are genuinely interested in my posts :(

We also been seeing this surge in the last week
or so, with every post will get around 10 to 14
new followers. They all look like from the same
bot boiler room. Plagiarist material abounds on
these new strange accounts.

Some those names on yours looks like the same
on mine. Afternoon time for north america seems
to be when we get the most as opposed to late
evening posts.

It indeed seems to be related to my posting activities, because only a moment after I posted this article, I got two new "followers". They must be bot generated indeed.

I have also this kind of followers. Some from the last screenshot I recognized. They followed me almost instantly after I made some posts. I think I triggered something when using the tag money. I checked some profiles and they all had videos and a reputation score of 25. It seems that we are not a million unique users after all.

Certainly not a million human users...! Far from it probably :( These specific ones all seem bot generated as another commenter suggested.

I have been getting lots of those too @edward.maesen. Somebody is evidently setting up a botfarm somewhere... earlier this week, I actually got 56(!) new "followers" inside a minute. Although it's a pain and time consuming, I have submitted them all to steemcleaners, just so they have them in their database.

If you use https://steemworld.org/ you can actually see them all by the exact moment they hit your account.

=^..^=

It's crazy... thanks for submitting them to steemcleaners. I tagged steemcleaners to make them aware of the pattern - although hopefully they know already.
I use busy.org as my main steem interface - it has a nice notification function in which you can see activity relative to your account - that's where my screenshots are from :)

This just happened to me for the first time the other day. Thanks so much for sharing.

It's a sad state of affairs :(

I picked up a bunch in the last few postings...

I guess we're all affected... :(

I've noticed the same. I've muted most of them figuring they can't be real people. At this point, I'm muting A LOT of people in hopes that muting somehow protects me from whatever these fakes are up to.

So far these accounts only seem to be interested in flooding the steemit eco-system with irrelevant posts. I don't follow any of them so I haven't found a need to mute them myself. But I hope that action can be taken on a platform level...

I frequently wonder about such things. I broke 1k followers, overshooting by about 40 in one day. However, I generally get somewhere atound 20 votes on any given post, which suggests a lot fewer.

Yeah, I also broke 1k followers and was curious how that so suddenly happened; My follower count started to rise a few weeks ago, without noticing any increased activity on my posts though.
I do seem to get extra votes, but the majority of those votes register as $0.000 last time I checked :(

Yeah... I check the "steemnow" website and see people upvote me at 0.001% when they only have 15 steem. It sort of makes you wonder why they even bother.

I suspect many people don't realize that their voting power diminishes the more they vote.

Heh! :(
Just moments after I submitted this post I got more new ghost followers:
capture-steemit-followers-ps.JPG


with a now familiar profile screenshot - this time showing the latest video post as well:
capture-steemit-followers-ps2.JPG

Yeah same for me, every time I create a new post I'm getting 3-10 bots following me, its kind of annoying :(

Annoying indeed, and I wonder what's the purpose of those accounts?

resale value in the future, I assume

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