With whale upvotes being so easy to buy on Steemit, it was really only a matter of time before this sort of thing started to happen, wasn't it? And it'll be sad if it continues until the trending page is just a mass of scams and spam.

WhaleShares people, I'm sure you mean well for the most part, but I hope you can look at this incident and reconsider whether you're really helping to move Steem in a good direction here.