One way of knowing is checking the account recovery, it's not perfectly accurate since it can be changed but a lot of the time it never is, it by default is set to the owner of the creation token.
I had thought where was a variable in accounts general account data on chain that mentioned the creator but seems there isn't or at least on hive.hub it isn't shown if such a thing does exist.
Not sure if something like this would get added since there isn't a need to know who created an account other than to perhaps find abuse, I mean it's be a nice data point to have for statistical data.
One could parse the blockchain looking for transactions that spend a creation token and tally them up....
On that note actually, you could find the creation date of an account, grab the block and find the create account transaction that is sent when a token is redeemed, it's sent by the account who owns the token.
This seems a mechanism potential of identifying the scammer that created these accounts, even if the cost of claiming the accounts was somehow gamed or hacked, rather than afforded via the intended stake weighting mechanism. Given the quantity of accounts used in the scam, automating a tool to perform the process would seem recommended. Additionally, this same mechanism would seem potential to resolving the identity of accounts gaining control of accounts whose keys have been phished, or otherwise acquired by hostile actors, such as has been an ongoing issue since the inception of Steem, since the date and time of many such seizures is known and parsing the blockchain data for transactions implementing changes in keys, power downs, and other actions typically undertaken during seizure of accounts would be stored in such archived blockchain data.
I do not have the coding expertise myself to acquire and parse this data, nor to code tools to automate such processes. I am willing to participate in funding such work, however. Is this work you have the capability to perform? If so, can you estimate the cost of performing that work and identifying the criminals involved in these crimes? If not, with appropriate consideration to the fact that the perpetrator of this recent scam apparently possessed nominal stake to fund claiming >7000 accounts in December 2024, can you provide a minumum required stake to claim that many accounts? That would at least enable seeking coders to perform the necessary work that are unlikely to be the scammer themselves, and therefore potentially trustworthy.
I very much appreciate your consideration and substantive comment on this matter.
Edit: upon rereading your response, "the account recovery...by default is set to the owner of the creation token." the account recovery information of each account would inherently be a feature of the account upon creation, that should be included in blockchain data recording the creation of the account.
This would seem to be a sure and certain means of identifying the account responsible for creating the bot army that was used in this scam. Is acquisition and parsing of this data something you have the capability to do? If so the above questions regarding cost of the work would equally apply.
The current minimum stake required to claim a token once every 4-5 days is around 10k HP iirc.
A claim uses about 80% of the RCs on an account that size and takes 4 days to reach 100% again. then claim again.
My account of 23.3k HP a claim uses 27% of my RC so I can claim an account every 1.2~ days recovering 20% rc a day. It'd be safe to say an account of 50k could probably claim 2-3 accounts a day, 100k would be 3-7 a day depending on how the RC costs of the TX are at any given time.
Given enough time you can build a lot of account tokens up, as you can claim then then hold on to them forever until you finally make an account with them.
I currently have 257 such creation tokens myself, Account like OCDB probably have in the 10s of thousands if not more.
I had thought the account recover wouldn't be reliable but of course everything is stored onchain as history so even if they changed their recovery account we can see go back and see what it was previously. finding the first instance would give us the account that redeemed the token.
I probably do have the skills to create a system to parse the blockchain and create a web of account creations stats but I don't generally do work for other people as I just do stuff as a hobby in my own time. (in other words I don't feel I can reliably get something finished as my interests in project flipflops like crazy)
It seems like an interesting project one I'd probably make for fun along with some other ideas I have kicking about but at the moment I'm currently learning more about RUST as a means to do these projects and know a robust language rather than continuing to use javascript/nodejs or other things that just don't vibe with me too well.
EDIT: regarding account claims it's also worth noting that you could very well lease HP i.e pay for a delegation of HP or better yet just RC as it's probably even cheaper and then claim accounts tokens that way. So you could get like 100B RC for example for like 1-2Hive a week and claim tokens like crazy.
My account has a max of 39.3 trillion RC
HW reports that the creator of the accounts has been identified, and used an exploit to create the accounts. However, the recovery account being a feature of accounts created upon creation is a useful thing to remember, and I very much appreciate your sound counsel.