Inspired by @marekkaminski's great bit of investigation of a 'spam carousel' I decided to take a bit of a look at the operation he focused on, with the aim of coming up with some numbers. Specifically, I wanted to see how many accounts 'tard' was running in this ring. For full details of what was happening, follow the aforementioned link. tl;dr - this person set up a stack of accounts as a voting circle, powered them up a tiny bit, voted on each other's spammy posts, then powered them down back to the piggybank account - tard.

Anyway, @marekkaminski and I both wondered how many accounts this was utilising. I have an answer - quite a few!

I ran the @steemreports financial accounts summary report and downloaded the .csv file. This covers the period from when the account was created on 3 June 2017, up to a few days ago.

Filter by 'Withdrawal from Vesting (Power Down From Other Account)'

Eliminate duplicates, and check the total, what do we get?

4758!

That's a quite a few accounts, some of which have been powered down back to the piggybank more than once.

How many accounts has tard powered up since June last year?

7829.

I wouldn't count on my numbers being exact. (a) I'm not great with excel. (b) I was using excel. Still, it's clear that it's quite a few accounts involved in this - whatever is going on. At a glance, I'd say they have powered up about $5000, and powered down about $22,000. I'd love for someone to double-check this, to see if I'm anywhere near correct. (Given my lack of flair for arithmetic, I'd be happy to be close).

This is just one spam-upvoting ring. Given that there have been periods when these accounts were pretty active and would have figured in the totals that @penguinpablo reports, I wonder how many spam accounts are boosting certain totals.

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