Fake Torrent Posting

[Megaohmz]

Hey guys! I just wanted to make a suggestion on how to at least slow down the incessant fake game/movie/music posts that are being put up every day.
Nothing makes me more pissed that we have such a great place to share files, and we have to put up with people who are trying to scam us one way or another.
My suggestion is to put limits on the total number of torrents one can post in one day. Maybe a 10 or 15 post a day limit is reasonable, and when you earn a skull your posting is unlimited. This would take the giant bullseye off of TPB as a place to shitpost fake stuff in huge numbers. It would make it impossible for them to post 200 fake games in one day, and they will move on (hopefully). Thanks for reading!

[politux]

Then they just open 10 accounts and upload 15 torrents with each account....

[dueda]

Also there're many such requests and suggestions. Only way to stop spam/fakes is to hunt down the perps.

[AllieC]

This is not a good idea at all. Many great uploaders post dozens of good torrents a day. The only solution is mods to delete them quickly. Fakes are easy to spot.

[MailerDaemon0]

Every torrent client I have ever used going back many years, has the ability to read the metadata of the contents of the torrent so for example, when you are downloading a movie torrent and see a CODEC FIX folder that contains a .exe file and a .WMA "movie" file in the metadata, that is a pretty safe bet that it's a corrupted WMA to open a hole in your Computer's defenses to let that .exe freely install all kinds of fun bits and malware, keyloggers and who knows what else on your computer.... 

If you see something suspicious say something here: https://pirates-forum.org/Forum-Report-T...s-Comments

Either tell them the specific name of the offending torrent in your post, OR link to the uploaders profile by copy/paste OR do both like this:

https://thepiratebay.org/user/ scammers site name

A Moderator or site employee will check it out and remove the offending users account and all their torrents if it is fake and if it's legit they will usually tell you that also in their reply to you. 


Fake Torrent's get easy to spot when you know what to look for
1.) There's no skull by the uploaders name (sometimes can be a legit uploader who hasn't earned their skull yet. These will be tricky sometimes to figure out but use the metadata and torrent name as guides)
2.) The Torrent name says it is something that has not been released yet, but the scammer has a HD BluRay rip before anyone else does.....
3.) The Metadata looks suspicious

[contrail]

Another thing you can look for is torrents posted in a minute if it is over 5 take a look and check if it is a spammer, also if you see a bunch of non skulled torrents in recent torrents it just might be a spammer. Otherwise if unsure wait a day then see, most spammers are cleared by staff in about 24hrs.

[jerrysmatrix]

Then they just open 10 accounts and upload 15 torrents with each account....

I'm not sure what systems are currently in place right now, but there's always a lot that can be done to help.

You could base it by IP address, but that would cause issues elsewhere.

You could limit 10 torrents per account, and limit the new accounts by IP, and raise flags based on that.

You could gather statistics and data on known spammers and fakers, and manually build rules based on that or feed it into a machine learning program.

You could implement a voting/rating system that hides torrents or warns people, and weigh the votes based on seniority and trustworthiness so that it doesn't get abused.

You could show a warning on all posts that violates these rules, and remove the warnings as they get validated.

When all else fails, you can make systems to bring suspicious torrents to the front that require attention or validation.

With all of that said, I'm quite sure someone could fairly easily come up with an algorithm to effectively detect spam posts, because all spammers/scammers tend to follow patterns. If it is an algorithm with too many false positives, it could in the least make it easier to bring to a moderator's attention or warn others. The trick is to find the right patterns to filter out.

[Kingfish]

The system in pace is that the site is moderated and fakes are taken down quickly, it is the case that there is a short delay from posting a torrent to the torrent being shown from all servers and all locations and this delay usually means most people don't get to see the fake accounts and TPB using Cloudflare helps with this.

There is little point posting a report for any torrent that has been uploaded in the last hour or so as the moderators and helpers go through them but for older torrents you can report them here or on the tpb IRC and then they will be manually reviewed.

[Cr1t1c]

You limit comments based on time, how about limiting posting torrents based on time.
Only allow one upload from the same user every... 5 minutes ?

[jerrysmatrix]

Are the spam entries deleted from the database or simply hidden? Because that data can be invaluable for a more automated system.