During the past few weeks, I have noticed an increasing amount of newbies asking short questions, sometimes illogical or inappropriate questions (e.g. asking about details of the ICO when the coin itself did never have an ICO). This was just strange to me before, until I discovered two different accounts posting exactly the same question, including the same spelling mistake here:



As I said in this quote, I suspect that the reason someone (or a group of people) is doing this, is to build up forum profiles with a high rank over time, by doing a lot of posts that do not really add any value, and later sell them to anyone who is interested in paying for a Hero account.

Unfortunately this is difficult to detect, because these accounts rarely seem to post the same question twice, and they seem to ask questions that are pretty common in fact. But as it seems, they are sometimes posting the same content across different accounts, which adds a new level to it, as it seems ...  

I would like this problem to be addressed by the forum administration for three reasons:

• To limit the amount of unnecessary newbie questions, which are often answered by me to support the respective community. In this case of fake accounts though, it will not help anyone because the author himself is just trying to increase his rank and is probably not even reading the answer I give to him.
• In this case, I may be tempted to start ignoring questions that get asked too often by these fake accounts, which hurts the actual newbies who are trying to learn about the project, and really want to know about this common question.
• When these fakers have successfully farmed their Hero accounts and sold them to scammers, this will increase the amount of scam projects that look legit because they are run by a high-profile member. Which in turn, will have many people falling for it and getting scammed. I'm sure everyone here agrees that scams are already a huge problem here, but even more so when scams will be run by high-profile accounts.

I'm not 100% sure how these posts are built; maybe they are just copying small posts by other (legit) newbies and re-posting them on other threads. Detecting or blocking this will, unfortunately, be almost impossible.  

Any ideas for how we can deal with this problem are welcome!   Or if you find similar posts or sets of accounts that keep posting these things, share them here so we can get an idea of how these people are operating.

Best regards,
Gandalf86


Edit: Further examples from the Espers thread (which is not an ICO!   ):




Some of the user names here are physicianheel, equatorialharmless, skinnynegligible, so we can definitely see some pattern here.