Guide: How to Recognise Abusive Accounts From The Largest Botnet That Is Active

Hello, Hiveians :-)

As some have already noticed for the past few weeks one of the abusive botnets has been spamming the feed.
The botnet was blacklisted and discovered a month and we share a few articles published by the community that warned about the abuse.

I have noticed that some Hiveians continue to get deceived by these accounts and drop upvotes on these posts so I think it is important to explain how to identify them.
They are not difficult to recognise once you learn about these common traits that they all share.

1. They all were created between August and December 2021 using the Splinterlands account creation service.

2. They all publish plagiarism of other Hiveians' content.
   If you notice the account that suddenly publishes elaborate content right from the first post, hitting known tags (often obsolete curation communities), you should be suspicious.

3. Most of the accounts published the first post in November this year.

4. All accounts have a reputation of 25 (unless recently upvoted) and have no profile image.

5. Most have recognisable names that start with certain wording that is repeated - only numbers change at the end of the handle. This is the list of all currently known predictable combinations:

bepba***
binhmay***
cy***
dautaycu***
hah***
hanabi***
huz***
hy**
hyhy***
jreey***
kama***
kent0***
kapitalismus***
koho***
leo***
meen****
miule***
mujafa***
nl***
nla***
nlzqnlzq113***
nobaby***
notabot***
nvt29***
nyc***
phanzi***
vale***
voi***
wanli***
xala***

For example.

Although almost all have predictable names, some have unique names like these:

Please watch out for them. I recommend always checking the description of the account before voting. When the account was created is the fastest way to recognise them and almost certain sign that it is a fake account.

Some also plagiarise "crosspost" posts, so please also look out as they can be easily confused as legitimate crossposts.

There are currently 18071 accounts discovered. If you need the whole list, please feel free to pop into our Discord to get the full list.

When you see them, please do not report them to us. Instead, we would appreciate it if you downvote them so they have the reputation reduced to under 25 to visually warn other Hiveians,
We decrease their reputation as we spot them. We also remove the active rewards.

@louis88 developed a bot that detects those accounts that have an active payout to be removed.

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PLEASE DO NOT REPORT THEM IN OUR FORM UNLESS YOU ENCOUNTER SOME THAT ARE NOT YET ON OUR BLACKLIST. THANKS :-)

You can browse currently blacklisted accounts here:
https://hivewatchers.io/blacklist-search

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Images by thepeakstudio.

Note: Please report any other abuse in the web form.