Hello all. So, I would not be creating an introductory post for this account. Instead, I'll get right to business.

On my research yesterday, I stumbled upon something weird. After a ton of digging into a user, I found evidence of plagiarism. However, this opened up the rabbit hole to something much bigger. So, strap on and let me take you through this entire network.

Say hello to the steemit user goodreader. I will not be tagging the users here, I will be posting a link to the plagiarized article though.

Plagiarized article	Original source	Professor
goodreader	https://steemit.com/hive-150232/@goodreader/20210417dian	https://messari.io/asset/saffron/profile
goodreader	https://steemit.com/hive-150232/@goodreader/20210418tui	Original

^{Here is the Proof for first one}

^{Here is the proof for the second one.}

The article on the left seems to be using some rephrasing tool to not make it seem too obvious and make it impossible to be detected using a plagiarism tool.

This post has a big upvote thanks to the user buying votes from tipu. So, I decided to go and check his wallet transfer details to see how much it cost me.

Surprise!

There was no transfer made to @tipu. Since massive upvotes from tipu can only be bought, I started to dig a little deeper. Using an automation console app that I created to find the history of transfers received by @tipu, I came across the account hnt.

^{HNT's account page}

Looking at the wallet history of this user, you will find that he buys upvotes, not just for himself but also for other accounts. If you look at the transfer history of this account here https://steemitwallet.com/@hnt/transfers, you will know what I mean.

^{HNT's vote buying activity | src}

Now, to give hnt the benefit of the doubt I put my detective cap on and thought to myself, what could be the reason behind one user buying votes for someone else?

1- Family/Friends account for initial growth.
2- The user won some competitions hosted by hnt and the reward was a fat upvote.

^{100% back to hnt}
Here is the next thing that I found on the accounts whose upvotes were being paid for by hnt. Yes! you saw that right! 100% benefactor rewards back to hnt. This is not the case with just 1 or 2 accounts. In fact, an entire community whose rewards are being funneled back into hnt's account.

So the community whose users are created just to bring back profit to hnt is https://steemit.com/trending/hive-150232
Currently, this has a pending reward of over $32,000!! Yes! you read that right! Over the next 7 days, $32,000 worth of rewards is set to be leached out of our blockchain if we don't do anything about it.

^{Here you can see another user with benefactor rewards routing back to hnt | Also the massive $32,000 pending payout}

Most of the accounts that can be found on the trending page are brand new with just a single post with a fat upvote. Apart from the voting bots such as @tipu and @nutbox.mine being abused, this user is also abusing @justyy's delegation voting service.

^{Here is an example of a post where justyy upvote algorithm cast the vote because the user has delegated to @justyy | SRC}

So, I would request @justyy to use caution while voting for a post from the AMAZE CREATOR UNION community.

How am I sure that this whole thing is a botnet?

So, one of the main uses of bots is to help do repetitive tasks faster. This is exactly what the posts within Amaze creator union show. Most of the posts here contain titles that are very generic, the format of the articles are very similar and best of all, they all provide links to the previous articles published by the user.

When a new user account is used to post an ad, they would not have any previous posts(Obviously!). However, the "Bot" still uses a template with an empty list of user's past articles.

From the above screenshots, it's evident that both these posts were created/formatted by the same user of the same bot.

So far we have seen hnt buying upvotes for all the members of this community. So, this must be the main account behind the entire operation, right? Nope.

^{Steem withdrawal to huobi (Probably for liquidation)}
The brains behind this seem to be https://steemitwallet.com/@alanyao/transfers this account right here. hnt funnels all the rewards from the whole of Amaze Creator Community and sends it to alanyao who then seems to send it out to his huobi account.

Another weird thing I noticed is that hnt's pending rewards are $0 even though he has several high payout posts. On looking closer into this account, I found out that this user has set himself as the benefactor as well. This is currently not possible while using the steemit UI. However, it is most likely possible to do this if a bot directly uses the comment API to create a new post.

^{Here you can see the benefactor rewards set to himself. Normally, we don't see this if the author sets to receive a 100% author reward}

I would request everyone in this community to have a look at this possible botnet leaching the rewards.

CC:
@steemcurator01 @endingplagiarism @sapwood @kiwi-crypto @steemitblog @justyy @steemchiller
@tatjanastan @steemcurator02