Bitcoin Forum

usually when i see some spam bot or someone spamming with brand new accounts, it is for farming accounts for future use. but this one seems pretty strange and i can't think of a reason why anybody would do this:
basically different topics are being spammed with the same string with similar looking accounts:

https://i.imgur.com/phLcnk2.jpg

reported a bunch of them but it doesn't seem to stop...

how is it even creating this many accounts with 2-3 minute intervals?!!!
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2546873
3 min later registered:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2546875
2 min later registered:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2546878
3 min later registered:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2546879

Maybe they will groom them for future sale. But then, they could be used for spamming fraudulent projects, or just for bumping announcements.

Maybe they were account farmers of year 2017 and before so they were not aware of merit requirements to rank up.

Possible bot activity to flood the Discussion board. There were around 30 brand new accounts recently nuked as reflected in the modlog around 2-3 accounts are still floating in the board for a filthy low life, hence reported them too and they would be nuked soon. The board is pretty back to normal state. This is the reason why theymos has appointed global mods from almost all the time zones to moderate the forum 24*7 restlessly. Both hilarious and mprep were last active yesterday, this should have been probably handled by rickbig41.

Account farmers, could be for sale in the future or could be for merit farming (not that those replies are honestly worth merits, though.) Just report the users that seem to be on a spamming spree for them to get nuked. Other than that there really isn't anything you could do in the mean time as the mods are the only ones who have control over such things.


For the sake of spam, of course. It would be neat for the IPs of these accounts to be blacklisted in order for them to pay in creating accounts, but then again they could as easily be using VPNs.

They are all gone... NUKED :)
See here :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5114772.msg49940271#msg49940271

A spammer testing his bot? And maybe testing the response time, all 30 involved accounts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5114772.msg49940271#msg49940271) have been nuked.

Noice. That was easy to spot the username patterns.

It most probably is impossible to ban through IP addresses since obviously these accounts are using lots of different IPs otherwise they wouldn't have been able to be registered with that kind of short intervals.

I think that for each such account a different ip address is used and there is no point in blacklisting these addresses, I think that new accounts will be spammed from new ip addresses. Is it possible to completely ban the use of bots on the forum?

Banning the associated IP addresses could mean that a VPN service gets banned which could create problems for those users using that VPN to browse Bitcointalk. And it is not their fault that the same service was misused in this way.

IP "bans" (evil units fees) only affect users registering a new account with that IP. If you already have an account and login with the dirtiest IP in the world, it won't matter.

And if you are a new user creating a brand new account, you can just pay the fee regarding how much evil units the IP has and you are free to go.

If you look at the Legal section (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=74.0) of the forum you will see the same situation as well. Dead threads have been woke up with their posts and most of them are not really adding anything up. I got surprised as well that threads from 2017 are still alive because of them. Also before that another member has been posting his legal service on this dead threads and maybe that is the reason why it had woke up. What I notice is that sections who don't have much activity have been a subject to spam as this topics are mostly untouched and new to them.

Nice, I didn't think that would be the end result for some reason, but I'm pleasantly surprised.  I don't know what the person behind those accounts was thinking.  For some reason I doubt they're ignorant of the merit hurdle for ranking up accounts, so I'm inclined to believe they were just bot-testing, as has been suggested.  Bitcointalk seems to be a magnet for these idiots, and I've never seen that kind of thing even on other forums with less moderation.

It's a damn good thing this troll made all the usernames with the same basic pattern, else the accounts might have been easily mistaken for real noobie shitposter ones--and there are already too many of those.  Good job, OP.

by default all nuked/banned accounts will get their IPs (at posting time) blacklisted, evil units added
and yes, if smart they are most likely posting via VPNs... so they can register more accounts from clean IPs

probably as you said, testing/tuning his bot or someone misconfigured his bot settings
and he didn't even try to cover his acts, he's using an easily recognized pattern on all usernames