Just to be clear, the steal part was mainly aimed at users such as flysky who've attempted and for a long time (thanks to bid bots) managed to take a lot of rewards from the pool for whatever it was that steemcleaners is onto him along with his friend dobartim who've been running schemes on discord to trick newcomers and kick those asking too many questions once they got onto them. Taking a quick look at his "poetry" should tell you what kind of content they've vote-traded/bid botted up for ages to get their rep and are stubborn to keep the facade going for ulterior motives than the rewards from what it looks like as that's pretty clear by now they would make more by just curating than attempting to post garbage and get into downvote wars vs the whole community. The main reason I got involved and heard about them was because even when minnows were downvoting their garbage/plagiarism they'd go after them with pitchforks and there were some other users behaving the same after the hardfork: "downvote me and get hit back twice harder" was not something I thought to be acceptable when giving the EIP a try. Luckily most seemed to have understood their actions to have been "bad" and the consequences they faced not just by big accounts downvoting them for these main reasons but also stepping up and countering the malicious retaliatory downvotes but also on their rep and future on the chain. Now there's still a few left who are stubborn. I take it once the price of Steem starts increasing and the curation they're losing due to even using their upvote mana to downvote starts having real value they may backtrack.

The thing is though and what I was pointing out here in the thread is that this is pretty dirty work for those getting in the middle of it and attempting to put a stop to it if you aren't completely passive like someone like @trafalgar or you who just comments and doesn't care about them being downvoted or how it affects those replying to you. Even though these abusers may realize their fault along the way they'll still hold grudges over those that put an end to their ROI fest and might continue to downvote them forever or try hurt them in other ways such as going after all comments on those users posts (like it's happening to me and a few others now) as they have nothing left to lose. It's kind of a dead end now where the only option for them is to either change their ways and hope people notice it before they just automate counter all of their downvotes and dealing with it that way while they rot away in the "deep web" of Steem once communities and SMT's take over or they will power down onto new accounts and start fresh. The latter could be encouraged by bringing their reputations down to 0.