In terms of both magnitude and quality, this is the single worst case of merit abuse anywhere on the forum.  Not only does he add no substance to the forum whatsoever:  #1076869 “pitipawn” has somehow become the current #4 on the list of “Top-merited users, all-time” by performing the “pump” part of ICOs (and you-know-what follows...).

Thank you, Betfair, for reporting this—and most of all (+5), for translating the Turkish for a sufficient proof.  I’ve had my eye on pitiprawn for awhile.  It was obvious that he was doing something questionable, at best; just the post titles alone show(ed) that he was openly soliciting merit in some fashion, even without being able to read Turkish.  But it would have been difficult to get the evidence, or even understand what his ploy was, whereas Turkish is not one of the languages in which I have sufficient facility to at least do what I call “human-guided machine translation”.

It is fitting that this was reported by someone who can read Turkish.

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Thanks.

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(Directed at Lauda:)

Of course, we will; and of course, Lauda will.

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Damn straight—and no, I don’t care if they starve.

What’s more, people susceptible to this non-argument conveniently forget that this money is drawn from the zero-sum game of pump-and-dump scamming.  All that ICO spam payola money comes from somewhere:  Bilked investors, many of whom are too naïve to really be blamed for taking the bait.  Maybe your grandmother.  Maybe some uneducated, honest working-class individual who is just trying get a little bump up on his hard-earned wages; he sees a glitzy spam ad filled with techno-babble he cannot possibly hope to understand—then winds up having food stolen out of the mouth of his children, when “pump” is inevitably followed by “dump”.

Why do the bleeding hearts never remember this?  Ah, yes:  Because they are not motivated by helping people, but only by a perverse desire to fawn with dripping empathy over trash.

Spam is spam, abuse is abuse, and that’s already more than sufficient reason to kick-ban pitiprawn and many of his spamming followers.  But it is wise to keep in the back of one’s mind the zero-sum nature of all spams and scams.  Every spammer’s and scammer’s gain is somebody else’s loss.

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Of course.  saulzaents refers to the lunatic who gave you +50 for red-tagging him, and gave me +50 for insulting him.  Either an insane masochist, or someone with a very guilty conscience—or a persecuted genius, whose actions are predicated on cosmic designs beyond the comprehension of mere mortals! /s

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I’ll chime in afterwards:  Without yeoman’s service done by you and a few others, the merit system would be totally corrupted overnight.  Since theymos said that signature campaigns will be banned if the merit system fails, that means we would lose many good posters who essentially get paid to spend all day helping people and answering technical questions on an Internet forum.  Many other good posters don’t have a paid signature—but those would also leave, because the spam problem would not be solved.  (Signature spamming is not the only type of spamming!)

If the merit system fails, the forum will implode.

So—thank you.