Bitcoin Forum

Check this out.  The vast majority of posts in this spam megathread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3351363.0) say exactly the same thing, and it makes me think this is either a bunch of alt accounts or there's some sort of template circulating in Indonesia or the Philippines.  The basic idea that keeps repeating here is:

My [friend/son/coworker/husband/brother/classmate] introduced me to bitcoin.  At first I [was hesitant/reluctant/didn't believe/didn't listen/was confused], but [insert happy ending here].

The first post is this:

And watch all of these replies.  They all say the same thing, just with specific words and situations varying.




































































Runner up posts that don't follow the exact formula, but come damn close:





What a fucking mess of a spam thread.  I think all of these users should be banned.

LOL I wonder how much time you have spent finding all these comments
I blame the signature campaigns for this kind of actions.
Hey, great job!!!

PS: I guess I have now a ready template to spam the forum.  :P

I see several threads and videos on Steemit and YouTube about the money that can be made by exploiting this forum and members of Bitcoin Talk, and I am sure that similar posts appear on Twitter and other sites. The basic concept seems to be to sign up for as many accounts as you can, and inter-post to increase activity and merit. You sign up with the bounty scammers to pick up a bit of income on the way, and when you have received a bit of rank on some of the accounts, you sell them for a few hundred dollars. I assume that the buyers will be other bounty pushers, and it is probably cheaper for a bounty manager to buy a few accounts to run himself, than to pay members to post rubbish to promote his scam,

Until Bitcoin Talk pulls itself out of the cesspit of bounty hunting and account farming, it is going to have to face up to ever increasing costs of moderating the boards, and the evaluation of new members. I hope that the admins will consider the position of the forum when bounty hunting and ICOs are made illegal in most countries.

One guy contact me on Facebook some time ago, asking some stupid questions about the bounties here, then ask me, home many account I have and that one of his friends was managing a few accounts with more than 80 bounties simultaneously, and he was wondering how can he managed all this work....so this is the result...

Welcome to bitcointalk. I trash one of those why did you come to bitcointalk threads probably a few times a week. They're saying that because that's why they are all here because their friend/son/coworker/husband/brother/classmate probably did in fact tell them about this forum. They probably also told them that if they can't speak English very well just copy a post from earlier in the thread or google for an asnwer and we can see that from the second and third replies which are both from reddit:



There will probably be many more copy and pastes in that thread.

As I've said before knowledge of this forum will be spreading like wildfire throughout the offices, streets and playgrounds of the Philippines and Indonesia because where else can you good earn money online from doing relatively nothing? I've seen people even say they've quit their office jobs to 'do bitcoin full-time'. A lot of them can't even believe it themselves at first because you often see them saying things like "when I was told about bitcoin I thought it was a scam and too good to be true" etc and you've quoted some of them yourself:



This is mostly why I'm still in favour of people paying a substantial fee to have a signature. It will stop the majority of these users signing up with dozens-hundreds of alts just to say the same thing over and over again and this problem is only going to get exponentially worse especially as crapcoin campaigns are willing to pay for any old rubbish time after time.

^  Not a good idea imo.  Those idiots are obviously doing this professionally.  So they'd be willing to pay no matter how high the fee is.  While it's the real users who would rather leave.

Edit:  I posted this a while ago, but it's still a good read.  They gamed and cheated the first Stellar giveaway done years ago.  Lol.

The Bot Bubble:  Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency
https://newrepublic.com/article/121551/bot-bubble-click-farms-have-inflated-social-media-currency

At the moment I'm trying to get my head around the Steemit concept. It's being pushed as the place to read about Bitcoin, and to learn about crypto, but many of the posts seem to be ill informed and inaccurate. BT is promoted s the place to spam to earn the money to invest in Bitcoin. I think they've got that the wrong way round, and I hope we can do something to reverse public opinion, but it seems to be a losing battle right now.

How so? Can you explain how the "real" users would leave? Most of the "real" users have already left because this forum has just been swarmed and overtaken with the shitposters the pharmacist listed. Everything will be the same apart from you don't have a signature at all unless you pay for it. These users do it professionally because it is currently 100% free to create an unlimited amount of accounts so they do. How is your average, unemployed illiterate Filipino/Indonesian going to afford $500 per account for a signature on his dozens of accounts? If this was the case most people would be limited to one or two accounts and it wouldn't be profitable to do this industrially. There isn't really any other way to prevent this sort of abuse because accounts can be easily farmed and now they are now done so along with merits (or they just trade them between their "friends").  It doesn't effect anyone at all other than sig spammers because users who come here just to post aren't penalised at all. The only people who would complain about this are the type of people who complain about merit and they wouldn't be missed at all.

All the time/energy spent to manage activities of many alts in the bitcoin forum is worth to offer many kinds of services and get paid wealth for that. 80 bounties is a large number and i can't understand how one person could it easly !!!!
This is how we appreciate the work of some moderators that are willing to make the forum as cleaner as possible.

Why is theymos against the idea of paid signatures? I'm guessing you've discussed this with him. It would literally prevent all this bullshit that's currently going on. Like it wouldn't have to be much. Like $250 as ball figure. That would prevent the shitposters from third world countries making unlimited accounts and earning a full time wage for their country with nothing but shit posts.

It's the best solution. It doesn't get rid of signatures all to together and it would mean whoever has a signature will stand out more. Signatures are good for listing personal projects and other things and not just signature campaigns.

Just read this.

The Bot Bubble:  Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency
https://newrepublic.com/article/121551/bot-bubble-click-farms-have-inflated-social-media-currency

I think anything is possible...  And their 'business operation' could be bigger than we think.

I don't believe he's elaborated as to why he's against it. As a middle ground we could experiment and offer the option to buy them in addition to being able to rank up naturally. Like we already have with Copper Rank we can have Silver and Gold Member. Silver gets you all the benefits a Full Member for maybe $150 and Gold gets you all the benefits of a Hero for $250. I don't see why this would be an issue because people can still rank up normally or just purchase the rank if they are willing and people do this by buying accounts anyway. Offering these ranks would severely limit account farming. If this was the only way to get them it would pretty much stop account farming 100%.

Instead of linking a article which yadders on about nothing and is trying to write a book quote the parts you think are relevant and source them. Most of that article I read until I got fed up with the story telling aspect doesn't even remotely relate to what hilariousandco suggested.

Bot farms would be irrelevant to what hilariousandco is suggesting because it requires investment rather than a few thousand accounts click "farming".

^  Why are you discouraging everybody from reading it?

I've already said a few times that I think the pay for a signature solution is a good one. But it seems that theymos is set against it so I've been trying to think of other ways to achieve it.

First off merit farming is increasingly difficult for them as the initial distribution drys up. Tying the availability of signatures to earned merit on an ongoing basis (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3122415) will slowly put signature spammers out of business.

Why does the forum ban ICOs from bidding in the banner ads auction but still allow them to advertise freely in signatures?


Why do we need the altcoin bounties board? There's no reason I can think of why spamming Facebook and Twitter needs to be organised here.

If we got rid those two things I think that would have a massive impact on reducing spam.

Although I agree that $500 fee for a signature would work I still think there are plenty of other things that could be done.

Hey, Pharmacist! Thanks for letting us read all this shit lol. Most of the non bounty threads with 20+ pages looks like this. They look absolutely the same on all pages and it seems unreal to ressurect them. Even if you ask those spammers what are they doing  you won't get a respond because they will never visit this thread again. Which partly reminds me of one thread that I've created some time ago (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3312703) but it was ignored but most of the community.
IMO in case with such spammers the question is more about the reward they get. If most decent bounty managers blacklist them then who da hell is paying? It is partly a fault of the projects and bounty managers that are accepting those users

He can always change his mind. I also don't think he's stated he would be against being able to purchase them in addition to ranking up naturally. We have Copper membership so Silver and Gold isn't a stretch and offering them in addition to being able to rank up shouldn't be any issue at all. He has already stated that the next step will be likely to remove signatures altogether so I think even sig spammers would rather at least have the option to buy them as opposed to not being able to have them at all. Even an impoverished person could probably beg steal or borrow the money to be able to purchase a sig to use an account here especially if it's their only source of income. Most of the people who are posting here will likely already have enough to buy one any way.


It get's harder for sure, but people have so many alts and "friends" here that they just constantly trade them between themselves for shitposts every-time they get them and that's what they do. If you have alts or friends here of course you're going to look to give it to one of them rather than merit a deserving post.


That's exactly the question I asked especially because all it does is further hurts the forum. Money that could have gone to the forum is now just saved or paid out to sig spammers to cause even more mess whilst the forum suffers financially.

I appreciate that and I'm not suggesting it's not worth still arguing for it. I was just thinking that there's more than one way to skin a cat and there are many other things that could be done as well.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.  Did you not read the OP?

That's some mad haiku skillz.  Lmao.

Now you're being naive..

You open a thread with the title "My friend introduce me to btc. At first I was hesitant" , complaining how the thread "how did you involve with bitcoin ?" was a spam fest where nobody bothered to read, just type two lines and you didn't see this coming?
He's not the first and certainly not the last that is going to post the same crap as long as this thread gets bumped in the the  Recent Unread Topics (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=unread)
Ups, I did it too...
 ;D

But at least it's going to be a nice honeypot, so you're going to get a lot of friends of friends of friends with this one. :D

Oh look, another thread that is probably the fifth this week that has been trashed:

What has changed in your life by Bitcoin?





And not surprisingly people are copy and pasting from reddit again:


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7gax42/bitcoin_has_changed_my_life/

Shit's mind-numbing. I swear I've lost IQ points moderating this forum.

Yeah.  I keep having to awake to the reality that I'm not dealing with human beings with brains and/or functional eyes.  Maybe if I ratchet down my expectations below sidewalk level I won't be constantly disappointed.

I can only imagine.

The farmastif strikes again.. you man are becoming a legend

I just thought what would happen if similar situation happened in real life. People roaming about and asking similar questions to each other in broken english and getting same repetitive answers. As @hilarious said it would definitely be mind-numbing.

Btw, I would have to stop introducing crypto to my friends or their posts might end up here. /s

Whoa! The Pharmacist! Hey man, you really took out your time to fish these out. And I agree with JetCash,  I think its not only the family and friends that caused the overflow if alt accounts shit posting in this forum. Most articles on the web have really contributed to this.  I saw an article on steemit that stated how one can open 10! Accounts here and post to make money. I am very sure whoever wrote that article is equally an account farmer here.

What really annoys me is that those guys are promoting Steemit as the Bitcoin info forum so that they can promote their posts and blogs to pick up Steem payments.

I read the title and was like " what the f*** is going on"

Then I figured some alt/or someone you blackballed found your first forum post or something and was throwing you under the bus.

I actually think people out there are running "call spam centers" hiring locals for pennies a day to log in and use their "scripted responses" and just type away all day long.

At first I was hesistant on this theory; but then the business model made sense when my friend introduced it to me.


* I demand 40% of any spam center that takes my business model.

Nice finding out those dreamers however it doesn't end their dreams in sleep paralysis.

Actually the template has been already made by yours truly theymos it was called Bitcoin Discussion.

Either anyone would do anything for the survival of their species or just do it for (gold) always believe in your soul they are indestructible.

---

I have an idea why theymos was against with paying for wearing a signature (probably) he saw many account with the same IP address and thought that the database will be against all odds also could leave a really deep collateral damage with the system for being in an obnoxious state just my two cents.

Finding them isn't that hard, I know that thread and every post is like that. ;D  Copy/pasting here probably took longer.

I am from Indonesia, and i feel embarassed too by this kind of members. People here tend to have poor mentality and they will do anything to get money, even though it is against the rules and their belief (which is a sin). I will not feel sorry if someday they got tagged or banned because people have proof of their cheating act. In fact, i really hope that higher authority like mod or admin can clean this forum from spammer like that. If you have time, maybe you, ThePharmacist, can do some work together with Indonesian local board mods, BitRentx and dbshck.

It did take some time, but it wasn't hard finding the posts--they were all in a single thread. 

I was searching for copy/pasters, and I happened to stumble on that generic mega spam thread.  The way I search is the old-fashioned way, close reading, so as I was doing that I started seeing endless variations of what I wrote in this thread's title here.  It actually blew my mind, because I just started seeing more...and more. 

What I'm wondering is how many people are involved, and whether this is some sort of ring of spammers--AND how they all came up with this idiotic outline of what to write (My friend introduced me to bitcoin.....).  It seems bizarre to me, but I know exactly why they're doing it.  They're making bank.

And that's what people why they are coming here just to earn a profit on the signature campaign or other bounties rewards.
Some of them making an alt account just hoping to earn more and that's part of being human a "greediness".

Yeah, we could help them DT members, Moderators, and Admin in cleaning the forum by clicking "Report to Moderator".
Probably copy-pasting is made by those handling many alt accounts, they can't manage it well. lol.

This isn't copy/pasting, though.  This whole thing reeks of something big and organized--organized enough such that there was an outline of a template post that was used to create all of those posts I quoted.  How that was done is perplexing to me. 

YES, I'M NAIVE.

Nah, you're not naive. They just learned how to bend not break the rules (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLjIyazFV9k). I learned that in that 70's. The simplest way to solve this problem is just telling the moderators to ban every spammer.

Let's go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOJSM46nWwo

When I read 50, 70 posts in a thread and see them all talking about the same thing, I'd report the OP and say that, this thread should be trashed.
I did exactly like what you did, I reported 40-50 garbage posts and at the end said that I'm done, this is just taking too much of my time and nobody
Is really stopping them.

Here theymos, have your free speech, offensive and extreme opinions. enjoy bro.
If you want a forum without these garbage producers, let a few volunteers disable their signatures. I wouldn't want you to hire me as a moderator/staff.
Just let me and OP here to clean some of the sections. you have our reports, you know what we would generally consider to be junk. I am offering my time. I don't want any power other than power of deleting posts of newbies, Jr members and members.

80 bounties simultaneously?! Dang it! Some people can be fucking selfish. I know most people may want to earn few BTC through a signature campaign, but at least do it and have the best intentions for the forum in mind. I guess this are the accounts that shit posts. Sometimes, I find it hard to complete my signature task for the week cause I have an offline work and activities to manage. It's so heart breaking that some people can do things to the extreme because of money.

Yeah admin should use that legendary ban hammer given by Thor since he will get a new one in 5 days  ;D . It is very hard to get rid of spammer if someone is not using it. By the way, what the f is that songs intro man @TheQuin, it is weird, very weird.

I know that they get an instant permaban for copy pasting but I don't really know what the policy is on banning spammers. It's all a bit subjective which is why that lyric "bend not break the rules" came to mind. They seem to find a way of doing just enough not to get banned most of the time. It's probably a good job I'm not moderator because my ban hammer would be worn out.

Weird was cool in 1979!

Nice article, man!!
There are many bot farmers, you can actually buy a Youtube or instagram visitors for a low price. In my country, if you want 2.000 followers on instagram, you will pay around of 200 dollars, and behold!! You're famous!!
Recently I saw an experimental documentary showing how to become a successful instagramer in a week. They just picked a girl (an actress), borrow some clothes from fashion shops, dress up the girl, take some pictures of her and buy 5.000 bots-instagram followers. In less than a month she was ask to go for free to some nice restaurants, and she was invited to any social-fashion event you can imagine. The girl acted as if her account was real, and now she's actually getting huge profits from it.
Many, many middle-famous people begin this way, for the social media is programmed to give them more views based on their followers, and to scale up is easier if you make a tiny investment.
It is amazing how important bots has become. But it is amazing this kind of stuff has any probability of survival in a Forum like this one. Instagram is one thing, but here? Really?
That's the reason why I think we need as soon as possible a report button in each profile section...

I just read this and I don't see how it's relevant to my suggestion. My suggestion would actually stop this sort of behaviour because this is what is likely going on now. Much like people are farming facebook accounts and likes etc people have been farming accounts here for years and now they'll be doing so with merit. In fact, it's much easier and probably much more profitable to farm accounts here now. On facebook you need a valid email address and a phone number. Here you need neither of those. Now, people farm accounts in an industrial scale both here and on facebook because it's completely free to do so other than a minimal bit of effort (which is obviously well worth it). Create an account, make some shitposts or copy and paste something and earn from any one of the hundreds of crapcoin campaigns that are constantly willing to pay you to spread their scam. If the only way you can have a signature here is to pay a hefty fee then this pretty much puts a stop to this industrial abuse instantly. Genuine users can have one or two accounts to post/earn with but the people who come here to abuse lazy campaigns with their dozens to hundreds of accounts are out of luck.

How could you determine that their from Indonesia or Philippines? I can't open those quoted links so maybe you could give me some heads up. Also, merit system already addressed those problems, starting from account farming to limiting old members to rank up if they are giving nonsense posts.