Massive "CommunityGame" Spam Ring Uncovered

Post Body

Over at /r/IndieGaming recently uncovered a massive spam ring by CommunityGame (website, youtube channel. We are aware that CommunityGame had been in trouble with some subs because they rehost trailers to their own channel, but as far as well know, no one seems to be aware of the massive spam ring. CG seems to use their staff to create reddit accounts and then exclusively or almost exclusively link their youtube videos. We were personally affected by at least 6 accounts (recently, that we have records for), but I managed to uncover 32 current accounts and 17 shadowbanned accounts.

I'll be notifying the admins of this spam ring shortly, so I expect that the current accounts will be shadowbanned quickly. In the list below, there's a screenshot provided for each profile, anticipating that issue. This post has already been posted in the gaming backrooms, and in /r/Modtalk, but as the spam ring has also targeted small, non-gaming subs, I thought it was important to post here as well.

My guess is that they have a handful of staff members that are each tasked with running a few accounts. You can see various amounts of overlap between some of the accounts. For example, /u/BlakeNaz (screenshot) and /u/KingKaiKai (screenshot) overlap on 5 links. /u/MattFivey (screenshot) overlaps on 6 links with /u/kominer (screenshot) and 4 links with /u/valnight (screenshot).

And /u/greenhoundy and /u/Torvusli commented on the same thread at the same time, suggested that one person ran both accounts, and switched accounts mid thread. Greenhoundy's comment, Torvusli's comment

And for funsies, here's a post by one of the accounts that was called out as /r/HailCorporate in the top comment: link

You'll also notice that they use lots of spelling tricks. /u/cominers and /u/kominer. /u/Gomaimai and /u/gomaye. /u/Torvusli is one letter off from /u/Torvusil (a popular 100k karma gaming account).

Unfortunately, because almost all of their posts are to their youtube channel, it's hard to find how deep it goes, as you cannot search reddit by a youtube channel. I found accounts the following ways:

looking through the /r/indiegaming toolbox notes
searching reddit for the website (https://www.reddit.com/domain/communitygamehq.com)
going to videos that were posted at least once by one of the accounts and using reddited to see if they were posted elsewhere. examples: 1, 2, 3

The oldest non-shadowbanned account I found was 6 months old, which suggests that there are hundreds more older accounts that we haven't found, and possibly many more current accounts that simply had no overlap with the batches I found.

Full list of current accounts:

Edit: New spam accounts within the last hour: /u/basTheBass (link) and /u/MarkGuyChan (link).

Full list of shadowbanned accounts:

While it's obviously impossible for us to confirm that these accounts were shadowbanned for spamming CommunityGame, we were able to uncover multiple links to CG videos for most of these accounts, and we have already removed and ruled out any accounts we suspected might have been shadowbanned for other reasons. For example /u/ConstipatedOwl has posted a CG video and was shadowbanned, but that's the name of another YTer, and it's likely they were shadowbanned for spamming their channel, and they just happened to link a video on CG. Or another couple shadowbanned accounts posted some CG, but only ever to /r/Stuff -- those accounts are also not on this list.

It's highly likely that at least most of these accounts are part of the spam ring. Looking through thousands of CG posts to this site, I found less than 20 made by legitimate accounts (including posts to /r/Stuff). Most of the posts were cross-posts. Users with a star next to them we found several posts for, and are positive are CG spammers.

How to blacklist CommunityGame using automod:

domain: communitygamehq.com
media_user: CommunityGame
media_author_URL: CommunityGame
media_author_URL: UC0r70J9l4XUULjYxS_CellQ

Author

Account Strength

100%

Account Age

11 years

Verified Email

Yes

Verified Flair

Total Karma

30,171

Link Karma

7,599

Comment Karma

22,572

Profile updated: 2 days ago

Posts updated: 10 months ago

hermithome

Subreddit

r/modclub

Post Details

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Posted: 9 years ago
Reddit URL: View post on reddit.com
External URL: reddit.com/r/modclub/com...