Tool it may help spot abusers/alts - Re-post from Reputation board

(Opened initially this on Reputation with the idea most "Merit/alts investigators" would be in there but turn out they may be actually in here as well, if you are an Investigator, i suggest you read this, it may make your work easier)

Hi,

i had made this tool visualization of the Merit Network to find merit sources:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4584759.0

But actually found out it may be good to find abusers as well. This visualization show the merit connections happened between users and in one of these version i marked also the red trust level for each user:

In here you can see who was red trusted(red), who is not(azure) and who is trusted (green) Updated to Sunday 1st of July

Link to the tool below: https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Network-Visualization/?config=config_Trust.json

Now if you move along the peripheral area of this circle you see in the picture, you will notice a lot of points (users) isolated from the rest, these could be transactions happened between alts or abuse in general(some in fact were already spotted as you can see):

Example 1:

Example 2:

If anybody has the time and will to go through these would be quite convenient as you can see immediately:

Suspicius exchanges of merits between users
If the user was already red trusted
If any people he had some exchange was red trusted
Clicking on the node you get information about rank - merit sent and received in general

If you have any questions ask.

More over: when you have identified some person of interest, you can use this other tool to output a list of the merit transactions with clickable links to the user profiles and message merited in the forum

Go here: https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Explorer-SQL/

You can specify in the last line the name of the user you want to search for ( in this example theymos)

Code:

WHERE UserData.Username like "theymos"

paste this in the box to see the merit sent from the user

Code:

SELECT
date,
'' || fromid || '' as Sender,
'' || toid || '' as Receiver,
merit,
'Link Merited post' as MeritedPost
FROM meritdata
Inner Join UserData on UserData.userid = meritdata.fromid
WHERE UserData.Username like "theymos"

paste this in the box to see the merit received from theymos

Code:

One real case research example

i went here: https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Network-Visualization

and found this user hrbt:

then go to see the same in here: https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Network-Visualization/?config=config_Trust.json

Run this query in here: https://albertoit.github.io/Merit-Explorer-SQL/

Code:

SELECT
date,
'https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=' || fromid,
'https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=' || toid,
merit,
'https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=' || msg || '#' || substr(msg,instr(msg,'.')+1)
FROM meritdata
Inner Join UserData on UserData.userid = meritdata.fromid
WHERE UserData.Username like "hrbt"

Result, i display the links of: who sent, who received and a link to the message merited:

Quote

Done, the situation in here is pretty clear.