Obvious merit farming. Using deception to obtain merit under fraudulent pretenses.

I am responding to a complaint about me and as a result any local rule prohibiting my posting won’t be enforced. The same tends to be true regarding ban evasion rules when someone is banned and responding to a scam accusation (or even to make one).

Sadly, I suspect that as a result of this, merit will flow much less freely to newer users.

I think the evidence is pretty clear that you are involved in serious merit abuse and merit farming, I strongly suspect among other newbie accounts. The evidence can speak for itself. This goes way beyond giving a few merit you received via the merit airdrop to yourself(/your “friend”). You were likely using an alt to ask a question in very poor English, and immediately use a text spinner to give an answer to the question to get merit.

Why are you posting a typing test? I thought the posts you received merit for answering questions from other newbies were the result of text spinning. I would say this more or less shows with certainty that you knew about the posts you were responding to ahead of time.

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@eddie13- i am still trying to figure out how to best run certain tests to confirm who this person is. He has posted what looks like an indication of having a gambling problem. If you look in investigations, you might be able to follow a link to find someone else with an apparent gambling problem who is somewhat close to TMAN. Other people who are close to the person I suspect this to be have also sent merit.

Being that other suspicious newbies have sent this person merit, I suspect this to be more than a one off situation.

I would question why suchmoon, who likes to spy on forum members didn’t previously catch any of this. Perhaps because someone who is powerful enough for her to not want to upset is involved.  

Fixed. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;flag=1208

No, I am not saying that person is your alt.

I want to look closer before I name the person specifically, but based on who he has received merit from and what he is talking about, I have a pretty strong suspicion.

Edit: I am not sure if the person wants to come clean, or if TMAN wants to come clean, as I am will to speculate that he knows who this person is.

It should be pretty obvious who the person who received that merit is. At least to those who are paying attention.

I think the 50 merit is probably excessive for the post he wrote. He is probably receiving other excessive merit as well. There is a non-zero chance this turns into a merit related scandal.

I had suspected that hacker1001.. was a bought account. IIRC, he kinda came out of nowhere and lent money to marcotheminer.

I think him previously being an ICO bump spammer would support the above.

Even without making subjective, case by case judgements, if you control what the algorithm is, you control the outcome. If you control the inputs of the algorithm (such as by controlling who the merit sources are), you have even greater control over the outcome. Making the algorithm public reduces control somewhat but it makes it somewhat subject to manipulation.

Well the thing is that once a person has a strong grip on being on DT, as Lauda does, it is very difficult to get them off, even if they are scamming or doing something very unethical or illegal.

Lauda should have been excluded from DT when he tried to extort zeroaxl, and anyone who kept Lauda on their trust lists should have been excluded themselves. Lauda basically avoided this by denying he did anything wrong, even though the facts were undisputed and by using strong language that removing him from DT was amounting to helping scammers.

The same is true when he was part of an escrow team and over a million dollars worth of various coins were unaccounted for and none of the escrow agents would answer any questions. Again Lauda denied doing anything wrong and said there wasn’t anything requiring him to give an accounting of what happened to all the money he collected.

If you can come away unscathed and still be on DT after being entrusted with a million dollars that goes missing without even giving an explanation or answering any meaningful questions, there isn’t anything that will cause Lauda to be removed from DT.

No, you are just upset that I wouldn’t give you special privileges regarding not repeating your name, that you had both posted and quoted multiple times, which makes posting your name within the bounds of the forum rules.

It is really not a good thing to be lying and being dishonest left and right when you have a baby on the way. The last time I mentioned this, you also got mad, but that’s not my problem.

At the end of the day, Lauda is horribly corrupt and he should be condemned in the strongest way possible. He has a very long history of giving negative trust to people critical of him for trivial and/or questionable reasons. He has a history of using his position of power/authority to personally profit (that would not otherwise be available if not for the position of authority/power).

Lauda should be blacklisted from being on anyone’s trust list unless they explicitly add him to their trust list, and ditto for any of his alts. The same should be done for any other person who similarly gives trust.  

Lauda has done some good things for the forum before and has blindly supported the bitcoin core team for a long time. Neither of these are a sufficient reason to excuse his behavior at other times.

I just came here to look for some posts to merit. I would suggest reviewing the flags against Yobit.

Like I said, advertising a scam for a few sats isn’t helping your case. Although maybe the few sats you are receiving is more than the value of your reputation.

Dear users, I would suggest you confirm any statements in your signature are accurate and not misleading before you add them to your signature.

Have you considered removing that signature promoting what is clearly a ponzi? I’m not sure why anyone would take someone promoting that scheme seriously.

Always happy to spread Christmas cheer. I am always on the lookout for merit worthy posts, even if I don’t have time to be as active anymore.

This is probably a pretty good representation of the thread in question. It is from May 2014, and there were the same number of posts in the thread as of Feb 2016. There are other versions of this thread here, but I expect them to contain the same information, or less information because some of them contain only one page.

My apologies, I had not seen that document. Although my criticism does stand with regards to your lack of calling out anyone involved in the yobit campaign..

Elsewhere in the deposition, transaction histories of all the account holders accounts are mentioned, but are not attached to the document. If you can find an account history of OgN's BS&T account, the last withdrawal(s) can be cross referenced to the blockchain (if the txid is not listed), and I will consider the probability if OgN actually received the withdrawal or not.

It was suggested by pirate40's lawyer that some pass-through 'lenders' were scammed by pass-through operators, although the article I read did not mention him offering evidence to support this.

The document you provided was a deposition of pirate40, who for obvious reasons is not the most reliable person. He also contradicted himself on the following page in where he testified to compared to what he told an SEC investigator via telephone previously. He testified that he first gave priority to new account holders, and then prioritized his long standing accounts, but he previously only said that he prioritized his long standing accounts.

I also reviewed posts of some others that pirate40 claimed to have paid in full, however, some never made any mention of pirate40, btc4domains posted that he lost money in the pirate ponzi, brendio posted multiple times that he had not received anything from pirate40, coin_toss tried to sell his BS&T account after he would have received payment. Imsaguy seems to imply that he was expecting a payout for his pass through, but it is unclear if he ever received a withdrawal, he did say in late August 2012 that he had not received anything.

Your posts are full of innuendo but isn’t evidence of wrongdoing. I don’t think there is any question that OgN profited from his pirate pass through, or that investors lost money in his pass through. I think of it as similar to a peer to peer lending platform such as prosper — people buy debt issued by the platform that is contingent on a specific loan being repaid by a specific borrower, the platform will collect a fee to service the loan and will profit even if the borrower doesn’t pay.

You might argue it was unethical for OgN to participate in the pirate ponzi in the first place, but there were many other people also participating. You might also argue that OgN violated a bunch of SEC paperwork rules, but so do most things around here. The amount that OgN may have profited was a few thousand dollars, but it might be zero if he invested his own money in pirates ponzi.

I previously thought that your beef with OgN was that he was running a signature campaign for what turned out to be a shady casino as this is when your scrutiny of him started. But it doesn’t look like you have extended those same concerns to yahoo who is running a campaign for an even more shady business that was known to be shady before the campaign started and that has been running for months. You also haven’t extended those standards to any of the people who have positive trust ratings who are participating in the campaign.

I would suggest that you find a contract, implied or explicit that OgN did not keep. 

Instead of slinging mud at OgNasty endlessly, could you possibly explain what contract OgNasty violated?

Sometimes expecting mothers try to be nice to others, and make an effort to be an overall good person. I understand both of those things are difficult for you, but you should try that.

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I am not sure why Dammitt was banned, but as far as I can tell, the other two accounts have not caused any major problems or trouble in the ~6 months since Dammitt was banned. Assuming whatever Dammitt did to get banned was not especially disruptive, I would suggest moving on.