Anatomy of a Reddit cryptocurrency spam-factory / Boing Boing

A guy named “Aaron” has been pitching Reddit moderators and other influential Redditors on their participation in a lucrative scam to inflate the popularity of posts about different cryptocurrencies, using massive farms of bots that post and upvote through a network of proxies that make them seem like they’re distributed all over the world.

As part of his pitch, “Aaron” sent his prospects a spreadsheet with details of the scam, which looks to be very sophisticated. It also seems to have been used successfully in the past.

“Aaron” declined to give a comment to Motherboard, except for a request to be paid for any comment.

But Aaron’s apparent spam campaign does seem to have its tentacles across various different parts of cryptocurrency Reddit. One product includes a blockchain-based ride sharing service, while at least one of the accounts appears to be focused on the Ethereum subreddit.

One spreadsheet lists Medium posts which Aaron’s…