The Insider NFT Bot Network That's Been Controlling the Market Behind the Scenes A PROJECT ( Y O U ' R E B E I N G F U C K E D ) (We think) Due to legal reasons this is a work of ction and exaggeration. We're just kidding lol. Just making a lil joke. Shoutouts to @notsack3, @NFTswiper4489, screendoor, exodus, solminingpunk, papa smurf, @_etheth, Big Fud, max, dom, @cryptomiyagi_, khonshu, @boringsleuth, and more for the support and for keeping a secret. ( H O W T H I S S T A R T E D ) We were looking into random projects until we found one called Meadowmoon. This lead to a google search of the project which showed us a lot of paid PR articles for Meadowmoon about their founder. (Goofy ass photos of Mitchell from the articles) Paying for PR for yourself is a little funny, since you're trying to convince people you're important - but it's not uncommon. What was weird was how Meadowmoon, at 20,000 followers, got some PXN Whitelists to giveaway. And that this one tweet on their small account giving away 2 Whitelists got 75,000 Retweets. It doesn't sound like much since PXN had a lot of hype, but let's look into it. (The giveaway had been deleted before we got a chance to archive it) A PXN giveaway tweet on their own account giving away more whitelists on the same date did half the numbers Meadowmoon's tweet did. More engagement than this one 2 days later. More engagement than this one a week before. Add That Meadomwoon giveaway on an account with barely 20,000 followers at the time got more engagement than any PXN giveaway ever. See for yourself here. The Team Behind Meadowmoon Meowy is the founder, he's 23. He's somehow veri ed despite his rst Tweet being in 2022 and only having 382 tweets total. His account also joined in September 2011, when he was 12, and it was dormant until 6 months ago. It's weird and we have no idea where this guy came from or who he is. Founder - Mitchel Pardy/@MeowyTheGreat Advisors: @gronkwizard & @OttoSuwenNFT Supporter: @ryandcrypto Pay attention to the replies on the tweets below. T W E E T 1 C L O U D S O L U T I O N S If we look at the tweets where the advisors were announced, we see thousands of bots. T W E E T 2 Both of those tweets had almost 2,000 more replies than likes, and those tweets aren't even whitelist giveaways. Why are people tagging their friends in the replies? Because they're bots. Now lets go back to the winners of the Meadowmoon PXN giveaway. @PatDelores and @ShelbyH62499917 But despite winning this whitelist, they kept entering new PXN whitelist giveaways. They also wouldn't respond to DMs. (Both have now been suspended for being bots, use these bots for similarish reference instead: https://twitter.com/savoy_ang , https://twitter.com/runjeffie , https://twitter.com/ReiBeltran , https://twitter.com/po_mcgarvie Both winners of that giveaway were bots, and it did insane numbers for no reason. We can assume that the majority of the engagement on that giveaway was bots, and we see the same bots on Meadowmoons advisor tweets from above. Maybe these bots are trying to win whitelists? Maybe some of them, but why is our bot PatDelores retweeting other Meadowmoon tweets where whitelists aren't being given away? So, Meadowmoon, a project that came out of nowhere from a founder that came out of nowhere (and felt the need to post PR articles about himself) looks like they're using bots for engagement. Why isn't ryandcrypto saying anything about it? Why isn't OttoSuwen saying anything about it? Why isn't gronkwizard saying anything about it? These bots are obvious and in plain sight, the numbers don't add up, and they're all over the page. Why haven't they asked people to stop botting them or called it out? Why are they supporting a project that seems to be using bots for engagement? And if the bots are here for whitelists, why are they on tweets where no whitelists are being given out? How did Meowy even get these friends and advisors? This is just the beginning of how far these bots go. But before we get into them more, let's show you guys what real engagement looks like. All the bots we found started tweeting in February of 2022, so we're looking at tweets before the bots came up to use as a sample size. Click HERE for our sample size and the reasoning behind our samples. And here's something to keep in mind - VIEWS DON'T LIE. So when that view/like/reply ratio looks off - it's because bots have targeted that tweet. Here's a tweet we botted ourselves. There's 1,000 more likes than views. Here's a memeland giveaway, 35,000 replies and 40,000 views - implying 87% of people that saw the tweet replied to it. Botted to shit. WHAT REAL ENGAGEMENT LOOKS LIKE Before we get into the bots and their purpose, we're going to show you how to spot botted tweets for yourself using analysis on our sample. REPLY:LIKE Ratio Analysis Out of all of the sample tweets, 3 of them have more replies than likes. Two of those can be attributed to a different Twitter format, and don’t t the sample guidelines. 1: Anomaly 1 Gave away 25 Whitelists for this Tweet each day for 4 days leading to more replies, not a normal 24 hour giveaway but we’ll leave it in to be nice. 2: Anomaly 2 Said tag “real friends” which lead to a lot of replies to the comments saying, “you think I’m a real friend?” like they’re in a fuckin Disney movie, so we’re cutting this out. This leaves us with only 2 out of 72 sampled tweets having more replies than likes, the largest outlier had only 1.2% more replies than likes. This should be intuitive, giveaway tweets should rarely have more replies than likes because it's easier for real people to like a tweet than reply to it. So a giveaway tweet having 86 replies per 100 likes is the average. This applies more strongly to tweets with more interactions, since a tweet with 50 likes and 60 replies isn’t that unbelievable. One with 50k likes and 60k replies is a huge red flag. This means there’s around a 3.27% chance of any given solo giveaway tweet having more replies than likes. And a .08% Chance of any given solo giveaway having 10% more replies than likes. So whenever you see a giveaway with 11,000 Replies and 10,000 likes, there’s less than 1 in 1,000 chance of that all being Real Engagement. If it has 20% more replies than likes, There’s a .0003% chance of it not being botted. If a giveaway was 24,000 replies and 20,000 likes, A 1 in 300,000 chance of it not being botted. REPLY:LIKE Ratio Results Mean: .86 St. Dev: .076 MORE STATS: A .26% Chance of there being more replies than likes 3 times every 10 tweets. A .01% Chance of it occurring 4 times every 10 tweets. If over half of the solo giveaways for a project that’s had 50 have more replies than likes there’s a less than 1 in 100,000 chance of them not being botted. VIEW:LIKE Ratio Results (REMEMBER THIS) Mean % of likes to views: .079% St. Dev: .027% (This ratio can also be applied to retweets and replies) Any Tweet with over 13.3% Likes to Views - 2.2% Chance of happening Any Tweet with over 16% Likes to Views - .13% Chance of happening Any Tweet with over 25% Likes to Views - Less than a 1 in 1 Million Chance of being organic engagement Now you guys should be able to spot when a tweet is heavily botted with statistically proven results. They count on you thinking 11,000 replies and 10,000 likes seems kind of realistic. It’s not. So when you see tweets like these, you can know statistically that they're insanely botted. How to tell how many bots are on a Tweet We can only really estimate this with giveaway tweets that include videos, so we can check out the views. Let’s use this giveaway as an example: 80,000 views, 43,600 Likes. We'll give them some leeway and say real engagement on this tweet would have a 15% view to like ratio (still insanely rare but we're being generous) So, 80,000 x .15 = 12,000 Real Likes We’ll subtract it from the retweets since those also count as individual engagements. 50,400 - 12,000 = 38,400. 38,400 / 50,400 = 76% At LEAST 76% of all interactions with this tweet are bots, and the reality is likely higher. 38,400 bots at least on one tweet. Now, let’s go through one of our con rmed bots tweets - @PatDelores Here’s a list of their latest 100 retweets: https://pastebin.com/hqaSVa1g Out of 100 Tweets, 68 of them t into that 3% chance of being over 2 standard deviations away from the mean of real engagement. That’s not counting the ones that’re 3, 4, and 5 deviations off. Giveaways with 30,000 likes and 42,000 replies is not real human behavior. Without taking other things into accounts, let’s see what the odds of 68 out of 100 giveaways being 2 standard deviations off base are: The odds are over 1 in a million before even taking anything else into account. All 68 of those tweets are heavily targeted by bots, and likely the whole 100. You guys probably already knew that was obvious because we’re going through a bots retweets, but at least now you know, the ratios don't lie. Now we're going to see how to nd bots in tweets with normal ratios. They're not dumb enough to fuck up ratios everytime, but there's another way to check. They are pretty fucking dumb though since botting views is like 10 cents per 100k. We'll do this by going through @PatDelores tweets where the ratios weren't off. They're obviously still botted because our bot Pat is retweeting them. TWEET 1 BOTS TWEET 2 BOTS TWEET 3 BOTS TWEET 4 BOTS TWEET 5 BOTS TWEET 6 BOTS TWEET 7 BOTS TWEET 8 BOTS TWEET 9 BOTS All these tweets are part of the list @PatDelores retweeted, these are the ones where the ratios aren't off. Click the links. These are some of the screenshots we got from the tweets, there's more in the links to the right. Luckily the bots are always clumped together in the likes of a tweet, you just have to scroll and you'll find the clusters. We see very similar bios of random quotes, adjectives after adjectives, random taylor swift fan bios, retweet the same tweets as bots next to them in the list of likes, and repeat PFPs. If you look through a botted tweets likes and you'll be able to see the bots easy. Look through their accounts and timelines. You'll see they only enter giveaways, mainly giveaways that already have thousands of entrants, most have no tweets, and the ones that do have their own tweets will only have 1 that's usually pinned or some weird inspirational quotes. The bots are in plain sight. "What if these bots are just here to win WL giveaways?" That's what we thought initially, but we'll get into that soon. First, let's show you what real giveaways and accounts look like for reference. We’re using Farokh’s recent giveaways, despite people having mixed feelings on him there’s no evidence of him being implicated in the bot network. TWEET 3 It’s crazy that a guy with 300k mostly organic followers like Farokh is barely breaking 3,000 engagements per giveaway when @ryandcrypto is getting 60,000 likes on a tweet, but this what real engagement looks like. The reply to like ratios are off, but that’s due to bots trying to shill their own NFTs and scam in the comments, not engagement bots. It's also nothing compared to what you're going to see. *IF YOU WANT MORE EXAMPLES, WE HAVE 100 IN THIS DOCUMENT TWEET 2 TWEET 1 Look through the accounts of those real people. Real People that want to win giveaways: -Don’t parallel the exact tweets of each other. -Don’t only enter giveaways with thousands of engagements -Retweet non-giveaway tweets -Make their own tweets, and don’t just retweet others After seeing that, you guys should be more confident in discerning bots on a tweet. INGRAIN WHAT THESE ACCOUNTS LOOK/ACT LIKE INTO YOUR BRAIN THEY WILL PROVIDE THE FOUNDATION FOR WHAT BOTS ARE Now we’re picking some entrants from those Farokh giveaways to show you what real Twitter accounts that engage in a lot of giveaways look like. https://twitter.com/avi_berkow https://twitter.com/BRuano17 https://twitter.com/__Dilip https://twitter.com/nillshox https://twitter.com/goldenboy_eth https://twitter.com/FOX_863 https://twitter.com/dstm5_ https://twitter.com/Nature4me40 https://twitter.com/Wild ower4021 So it looks like there's a lot of bots all over NFT Twitter. After we show you how they work, we can show you what they're here to do. Essential Info on Twitter bot accounts -Bot Accounts are rarely shared. Differing proxies when logging into bots causes suspensions, like we saw with Shelby and PatDelores, the bot operators usually keep them all hosted on the same machines with the same consistent proxies to avoid the bots getting banned. -Bot Accounts operate in Networks. There’s programs that allow you to operate tens of thousands of Twitter bots from one computer - so why just operate 100 bots when you can scale up to 100,000 and manage them all from the same place? Some networks have a few thousand bots, some have 100k+. All bots in a network are controlled by the same person/group due to the accounts not being shared to avoid suspension. -Networks are operated by the person/people operating the bots and setting them up. Generally only a handful of people have access to directly mobilizing the bots and sending them on tweets, to help keep the bots IPs stable and avoid bans. On Bot Networks Bot networks are what we're going to be focusing on for the most part, because our research is about uncovering the biggest one in the Twitter NFT market. This document is about the reasoning, purpose, and people behind the major NFT bot network. They're made through usually paying for a lot of aged twitter accounts on a site like accsmarket.com or making new ones. Then mass changing their PFPs and bios, warming them up for a little bit, then putting them all into your software with proxies so you can control all of them from a single application on your computer/virtual machine. Bot Network: A collection of bots, usually multiple thousands, operated under a singular entity for a speci c purpose. What a Bot Network Looks Like We looked around for weeks on multiple websites, nulled, cracked.to, ogusers, blackhatworld.com, different Discords, and Telegram groups for days. We could only nd ONE publicly available NFT botter. An advertisement for Dmister's NFT botting services on blackhatworld Dmister uses his bot network to sell engagement to NFT projects and help them look hyped, for $100 per 1k likes/rts/replies. We asked if he ever uses his bot network to win Whitelists himself, he said no despite easily being able to do so. NOTE: Dmisters site didn't go live until Mid-July. This botnet was active since February. Lets look at a Tweet we paid Dmister to bot TWEET Most of the engagement in this tweet is obviously bots, and all the bots in it are from the bot network Dmister operates. Let's pick out a few of them (LOOK THROUGH THEIR ACCOUNTS YOURSELF) https://twitter.com/Mfarooq98839277 https://twitter.com/Syedmeh73692470 https://twitter.com/Sarmin47 https://twitter.com/Bonie_Meredith https://twitter.com/Dimas79314362