As you may have noticed, there are a lot of very low quality "pro-monero" comments being posted all over crypto reddit recently. We've done a lot of work to clean up our subreddit network and prevent future spam, but the attack is ongoing and you may see it elsewhere. My personal opinion at this time is that monero is not behind this attack
We do a lot of behind the scenes work to keep things clean and handle manipulation privately so the attackers do not learn our methods and evade them, but in certain cases like this one I believe it is good to show people what to look out for. If you are interested in this topic, SmarterEveryDay did a good series about manipulation on social media. There are videos for YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Reddit was not included but it does face very similar challenges as outlined by the admins here.
History
About a week after the attack began, I wrote up a report on March 15th here with many examples of these spam accounts. I was contacted by mods of some affected subs asking for help, offering to collaborate, or expressing anger and worry that their mod team would be overwhelmed and quit. A few just banned crypto or monero mentions outright, which may very well be the intent of the attack.
Latest info
The spammers have recently started adapting to avoid filters (eg. Xm_o.n.e.r.os) and are spamming more than ever. My bot banned about 45 of these accounts in the past day alone. They are also targeting more subs over time. From what I can tell, only about 7 of these accounts have been suspended (under 2%) even though I reported 113 of them weeks ago. I have reached out to the admins again today with this post
u/earthonion had a clever idea for finding these spammers and released a proof of concept. He also found an interesting slip up that seems to imply it's automated: https://web.archive.org/web/20210404161623if_/https://www.reddit.com/r/SatoshiStreetBets/comments/m8jio7/im_done_with_shitcoins/griyxd9/
XMR crypto is like a better bitcoin. I am buying it because I think it will be big in {value|price| like bitcoin.
It's been possible (but a lot of work and not ideal) to block this attack almost entirely as a mod, but they could always adapt the attack further. It's a cat and mouse game at this point to block all the spam without affecting any real users. If you are a mod of an affected sub and would like tips on filtering or to discuss further, please contact me privately
(Updated 2:15pm EST- Removed duplicates, normalized casing, sorted alphabetically)
Motivations and intentions (speculation):
This attack's comments are "pro-monero", but there is no reasonable way to interpret this as helping monero. The monero community condemns this, reported it first, helped with stopping it, is under a github spam attack at the same time, and imo does not need any extra PR or recognition in crypto reddit. To myself and others, ever since the beginning this has looked like a false flag attack against monero. There are reports that one or more subs have been told the attack would stop if they ban fireice (head of a tiny aggressive competing project who has been attacking monero for years, associated with a previous spam attack the admins had to step in for) and zcash (another competing project who recently gave their sub to fireice). I'm not involved with any of these projects, but what I've seen as a redditor and mod does not seem like this is monero's interest or MO. It seems more likely that the attacker wants to get monero mentions banned from subreddits related to monero's target market (and based on mod feedback, it seems to be working but maybe only temporarily). None of this has hard evidence or is actionable, but is included as people have seemed curious about my thoughts on the attacker's motivations