Is my cheating plan good enough for RED?

[Sm0gg]

Hey everyone,

I'm struggling to survive on RED and would also like to get invites for my friends. There's no way I can get there legit, my ~20GB ~100 torrents have been actively seeding for months and I barely get a few megabytes per week on a fiber connection (ridiculous). I've never cheated before, so I've read tips and tried to prepare a plan of attack but I'm not sure it's gonna work.

Here's what I plan on doing:

- Use RatioMaster Plus with qbittorrent v4.3.5 (which is my client) - I have the .rmc file for it

- Add all of my RED torrents to it (about 100 of them including partial seeds)

- Set every torrent to 0-1 KBps upload speed (with a random radius of 1 meaning some torrents won't upload at all)

- Set every torrent to 0 download speed

- Set "seeding" finished% (even for partial seeds since there does not seem to be anything else than a global option for this)

- Set torrents to automatically stop above 2 ratio

- Keep it running in the background with my actual qbittorrent client

This should average to about 50 KBps total (.5 KBps per torrent) which is 3 MB a minute which is 180 MB an hour. I would be doing this several hours a day, when my PC is on, for an avg of ~8.5 hrs a day which would be 1.53GB a day on average. I would only do this for enough time that I can get around 25GB uploaded (which would be ~1.66 ratio) so I can get the user class for invites and some buffer for snatching more torrents. With these speeds I could get there in about 2 weeks.

Here's what I think are weaknesses in my plan but I'm not sure if they will prove fatal or if they'll go unnoticed:

- There are a bunch of partial seeds, sometimes only a few MB, so if I set a ratio of 2 as my limit my actual ratio will be like 100 on these because RatioMaster Plus can only use total torrent size. I can fix this by going over each torrent manually and setting the correct limit which will be tedious.

- It's not super realistic that at the end all of my torrents will have a ratio of 1.5-2 each with a lot sitting at an almost perfect 2 (realistically, some will never ever reach 1 ratio even with a seedbox because they're just not popular enough) - I could go through them and manually randomize ratio limits

- I'll be seeding lots and lots of torrents without any leechers, albeit very slowly - this seems to be a big no-no, but the problem is that on Redacted, there are no leechers almost ever, apart from partial seeders, and they all complete in about a minute or two anyway, so if this is a no-no, then I can't do this at all?

- Although the speeds are slow individually, multiplied by time and amount of torrents, I'll be uploading a lot and my upload which has barely moved in 5 months will all of a sudden be quintupled in 2 weeks. The only way to fix this, as far as I can see, is slowing things down even more and stretching my goal over 2+ months instead of 2 weeks.

- Almost all my torrents will be uploading constantly very slowly whereas usually you'd get a big spike of upload when a leecher connects, for maybe 1 or 2 minutes, and then nothing for the rest of the day

Here are my questions:

- Instead of using RatioMaster like this (seeding the 100 torrents I have), should I look for recent/popular torrents on RED, add them to RatioMaster, and spoof both download and upload to make it look like I'm snatching torrents and uploading without ever adding them to my qbittorrent? (I don't want to store torrents on my machine just for the sake of building ratio so I don't want to legit download them)

- Is what I'm doing risky? How risky?

- Am I trying to go too fast? Should I slow it down?

- Anything to improve on?

- Can I do things more efficiently? Remove some of the tedium involved in setting things up correctly for each torrent? (like randomize ratio limit and set the correct value for partial seeds)

- Could this method work for other trackers such as OPS?

Thanks for reading this long post and thanks for your help

[anon]

Funny, I was discussing this exact strategy with another member here recently. As in yesterday. Anyway, this is an extreme variant of the slow and steady method (see http://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?t=15507 and http://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?p=360433) and it works due to two simple factors: 1. the speeds involved are extremely low; 2. if spread over many torrents, which you will want to do to get anywhere within a reasonable timeframe, the amount of fake upload will be collectively large but individually small. I would still recommend favoring torrents that have at least some leechers (even if they're partial seeders) or activity.

Also, feedback to individual parts of your post.

There's no way I can get there legit, my ~20GB ~100 torrents have been actively seeding for months and I barely get a few megabytes per week on a fiber connection (ridiculous). Not sure if this means 100 torrents of 20 GB each or 100 torrents totaling 20 GB, but the latter case is more likely and actually a low amount for RED.

Set "seeding" finished% (even for partial seeds since there does not seem to be anything else than a global option for this) Look closer in the advanced settings and you'll find the ability to select which files you want to emulate having, just like in a real client.

Set torrents to automatically stop above 2 ratio Only if you plan to start them in your real client immediately afterwards, otherwise set them to drop the fake upload speed to zero but continue seeding.

Keep it running in the background with my actual qbittorrent client Never run the same torrents in your client and a ratio cheating program at the same time!

It's not super realistic that at the end all of my torrents will have a ratio of 1.5-2 each with a lot sitting at an almost perfect 2 (realistically, some will never ever reach 1 ratio even with a seedbox because they're just not popular enough) - I could go through them and manually randomize ratio limits Do.

I'll be seeding lots and lots of torrents without any leechers, albeit very slowly - this seems to be a big no-no, but the problem is that on Redacted, there are no leechers almost ever, apart from partial seeders, and they all complete in about a minute or two anyway, so if this is a no-no, then I can't do this at all? See above ("I would still recommend favoring torrents that...").

Although the speeds are slow individually, multiplied by time and amount of torrents, I'll be uploading a lot and my upload which has barely moved in 5 months will all of a sudden be quintupled in 2 weeks. The only way to fix this, as far as I can see, is slowing things down even more and stretching my goal over 2+ months instead of 2 weeks. That's even better. There are no time limits here, after all.

Instead of using RatioMaster like this (seeding the 100 torrents I have), should I look for recent/popular torrents on RED, add them to RatioMaster, and spoof both download and upload to make it look like I'm snatching torrents and uploading without ever adding them to my qbittorrent? Don't.

Could this method work for other trackers such as OPS? OPS is very easy to cheat on. Someone even said they flashed 1 TB of upload several months ago. I don't recommend that particular tactic, but the consensus is that almost anything goes there. The corresponding thread will tell you more.

[Sm0gg]

Thanks!

True, 20 GB isn't a lot. My torrenting mentality is that I only get what I actually want, and keep it seeded. I don't download something just for the sake of gaining upload - hard drive space is expensive!

I'm curious, why don't you recommend downloading popular torrents and faking both download and upload? Seems safer in that there'll be more leechers.

About never running the torrents twice, can I just pause them in my qbittorrent and leave it running for other torrents?

I will try OPS first and see if I get away with ~5 GB of faking at ~70 kbps speeds on 9 torrents (around 630 kbps total) for 2 hours so I can get the user class for invites.

I'm concerned about only running torrents that have leechers. Only a couple torrents have a good amount of leechers (more than 10), most of which are definitely partial seeders (or they'd turn into seeders in an hour at most). 80% of the rest have 1-2 (partial seeders too). The rest have none. If I assume 1-2 leechers isn't enough, I can only seed 3 torrents. If I don't, I can seed most of them. What do you think?

[Sm0gg]

I cheated a few GBs on Orpheus and nothing happened so far.

I started doing it for RED. I'm uploading at an average of 62.5 bytes per second per torrent. It's ridiculously slow but it should be perfect. Each torrent will upload 3.75 KB per minute, or 225 KB per hour, or, assuming 8 hours of seedtime per day, 1.8 MB per day.

My 96 torrents will therefore upload 172.8 MB per day, or 1.2 GB per week. I'm generating around 5 GB per month in the slowest way possible. I'll get to my goal in 4-5 months, which is reaaaaaally slow. I wonder if I can speed up a bit, but for now I'll keep it like this.

[anon]

True, 20 GB isn't a lot. My torrenting mentality is that I only get what I actually want, and keep it seeded. I don't download something just for the sake of gaining upload - hard drive space is expensive!

Thanks to freeleech tokens and the required ratio system, this mindset will allow you to download a lot, but also result in very little upload. All music trackers have a hard economy and leecher crisis by design; casual usage will definitely not build you a buffer.

I'm curious, why don't you recommend downloading popular torrents and faking both download and upload? Seems safer in that there'll be more leechers.

Fake downloading is easier to spot since it requires higher speeds (most residential connections are asymmetrical) and must be completed, unlike fake upload where much lower speeds are expected and you can "abandon" a torrent that's no longer good enough for cheating by setting the speed to zero. Also, leechers dry up quickly on RED, but you know that already

About never running the torrents twice, can I just pause them in my qbittorrent and leave it running for other torrents?

Yes.

I will try OPS first and see if I get away with ~5 GB of faking at ~70 kbps speeds on 9 torrents (around 630 kbps total) for 2 hours so I can get the user class for invites.

You'll very likely get away with it, but they seem to have few or no anti-cheating scripts (see my previous comment about flash upload), so don't let those results set your expectations for RED.

I'm concerned about only running torrents that have leechers. Only a couple torrents have a good amount of leechers (more than 10), most of which are definitely partial seeders (or they'd turn into seeders in an hour at most). 80% of the rest have 1-2 (partial seeders too). The rest have none. If I assume 1-2 leechers isn't enough, I can only seed 3 torrents. If I don't, I can seed most of them. What do you think?

As I said before, the thing that makes this method work is the fact that the speeds involved are so low. Picking a torrent with a non-zero amount of leechers (partial or not) provides basic cover against scripts or staff checking for upload traffic on torrents that shouldn't have any, but is technically not a key part of the plan.

Also, don't forget Gazelle trackers show you and your amount of upload in torrent peerlists, so try not to become #1 there.

I started doing it for RED. I'm uploading at an average of 62.5 bytes per second per torrent. It's ridiculously slow but it should be perfect. Each torrent will upload 3.75 KB per minute, or 225 KB per hour, or, assuming 8 hours of seedtime per day, 1.8 MB per day.

Note that qBittorrent rounds upload traffic to the next multiple of 16384 bytes (1 block). Given the insanely low speed used, you may want to account for that too.

[czullo]

Isnt this unsafe to stop seeding all your torrents at 2.0 ratio? If someone inspect your profile and see everywhere 2.0 ratio that would be suspicious.

[Sm0gg]

I can't see any way to check a user's ratios for individual torrents on RED, but yes, it is pretty unsafe.

It ain't the only unsafe thing. If a mod (whom I believe could probably see a lot of info) were to check my stats right now, they'd see that I uploaded close to the same amount of data on 96 torrents (2.19-2.30MB) in a few days. They'd also see that I was uploading on 96 torrents, end of sentence (that, by itself, is unbelievable). They'd also see that I was uploading non-stop for 8 hours every day, which is also unbelievable. Especially on torrents without leechers (only 9 do have leechers so I decided fuck it, I mean I'm only reporting 200 kilobytes of upload per 45 minutes per torrent).

I guess the entire point of this method I'm using is that no human ever checks my stats out because no script will ever detect me at such low speeds (also I'm a small player). It's all hanging on the hope (not knowledge, hope...) that their scripts aren't sophisticated enough to detect this kind of cheating. I don't think this assumption is unreasonable, but only time will tell.

[anon]

I can't see any way to check a user's ratios for individual torrents on RED

I don't see a log of which profiles I've visited, IPs I have logged in from or browsers I've used either, but it's there. And did you know Gazelle never deletes PMs from the database, only marks them as being neither in the inbox or outbox? Anyway...

Isnt this unsafe to stop seeding all your torrents at 2.0 ratio? If someone inspect your profile and see everywhere 2.0 ratio that would be suspicious.

I guess the entire point of this method I'm using is that no human ever checks my stats out because no script will ever detect me at such low speeds (also I'm a small player). It's all hanging on the hope (not knowledge, hope...) that their scripts aren't sophisticated enough to detect this kind of cheating. I don't think this assumption is unreasonable, but only time will tell.

Yes, but also yes. Legitimate clients can be configured to stop torrents when a target ratio is reached. However, hitting 2:1 on all torrents, within the same timeframe, from a home connection, and on RED (where you could seed something for months and still have zero upload) is almost a statistical improbability... that's also unlikely to be discovered in the first place, in this context.

If you're still worried about that, shuffle your target ratios or only cheat in a small pool of torrents. Although at 62 B/s, if you set yourself any more restrictions, we'll be colonizing Mars by the time you reach Power User.

[anon]

I'll get to my goal in 4-5 months, which is reaaaaaally slow.

This was written two months ago, and I'm too lazy to wait another two... so how's the plan working out so far?

[Sm0gg]

I'll get you a screenshot of my RMP when I'm home. I was away from home for 3 weeks. A few weeks before and after, I gave up on running RMP every time I booted my PC, especially since it takes around 10% of my cpu on avg and I need to save as much as possible for some games.

I started again a few days ago. So far, 5 GB total. Not a lot xD

I also tried using 30 fl tokens on non-transcoded flacs, transcoding all of them twice into mp3 320 and v0, and uploading all of that. Got tens of gigabytes worth of stuff. So far, no snatches. Makes sense, it's garbage, but it was worth trying. And I doubled the amount of torrents I can cheat on (100% complete too, no partial).

Still gonna take me some ~2 months before I hit 25 GB uploaded.

Next thing Ima try is upload some heavy apps. Apps are not updated that often on Redacted and some of them weigh a few GB. So I can probably find a bunch that I can upload and get easy 15 GB with that.

In any case, no ban yet. Cheated 5 GB over 289 hours. The method really worked. And it's pretty obvious too, if anyone checked my stats. But for 5 GB over months... I guess they don't care.

---------- Post Merged at 17:36 ---------- Previous Post was at 13:38 ----------

*removed*

So as you can see, I wasn't very careful there and still no ban!

[illusive]

Ghost leeching & fresh uploaded popular torrent with some fake normal uploading speeds around 1MB/s working. I'm not sure about RED script being as strong as WCD was or not but so far it seems greatly NOT even close.

[Sm0gg]

So you mean snatching fresh torrents, faking download and upload at the same time? Or do you fake upload after the torrent has "completed" ?

Also 1 MBps seems like a lot!

[illusive]

It is a lot and great risk in small torrents tracker. I'm just testing with the risk. And yes I mean snatching fresh torrents for real and fake uploading on such torrents AFTER download is completed. However I struggled to catch a popular torrent with a lot of activity and was big (more than 1 GB) enough to do so.

[faltu]

You got a lot of balls to cheat on RED given that you'll be globally banned if you get banned on RED.

[anon]

I started again a few days ago. So far, 5 GB total. Not a lot xD

Far more than you'd have achieved by seeding everything legitimately for the same period of time.

I also tried using 30 fl tokens on non-transcoded flacs, transcoding all of them twice into mp3 320 and v0, and uploading all of that. Got tens of gigabytes worth of stuff. So far, no snatches. Makes sense, it's garbage, but it was worth trying.

Autosnatchers only grab FLAC from the current year, since that gets the most bang for their buck. I admire your effort to contribute with "real" uploads (as opposed to pump-and-dump spam torrents made purely to meet promotion thresholds), but when it comes to obtaining buffer, those are a long-term strategy. If you have any tokens left, better use them to simply download music you want instead.

Next thing Ima try is upload some heavy apps. Apps are not updated that often on Redacted and some of them weigh a few GB. So I can probably find a bunch that I can upload and get easy 15 GB with that.

Apps are good to meet torrent count requirements for higher classes, but you should moderate your expectations of getting so much upload from them. Would you use your precious RED buffer to download warez you can get somewhere else?

*removed*

So as you can see, I wasn't very careful there and still no ban!

Not being very careful here either, posting a detailed list of the torrents you're cheating on for the entire world to see. I just removed it for your own security.

I'm not sure about RED script being as strong as WCD was or not but so far it seems greatly NOT even close.

That's because cheating isn't really an issue they have to worry about. Consider the historical context. What.cd was created and thrived during an era when connection speeds were much slower than they are now, and seedboxes weren't as fast or cheap either. Furthermore, during their first two years there was no "required ratio" system, and failure to get out of ratio watch in time didn't revoke your download privileges, it got you banned! Add the fact streaming services initially didn't exist, and later on would take a while to become the powerhouses they are today, and it makes sense that 1. a lot of members would attempt to cheat, 2. staff would take advanced measures against it.

RED was able to benefit since day one from everything What had to learn along the way, but its challenges are different. A large amount of people choose not to join at all, since Spotify and iTunes provide a good enough experience for a small fee and zero bullshit. Most of those who do are only interested on seedbox-raping their way to the invite forum. But let's say you can't or don't want to pay for streaming, and have no interest on invites. In that case, you can download up to 20 GB without having to upload anything, as long as you permaseed it all. On top of that, freeleech tokens are handed out regularly and can also be earned by unlocking achievements on the site. There is no bonus points system, or any means of getting upload credit other than actually uploading data, and there will never be - but as long as you can download, who cares?

Basically, as I see it, this means their problems are the complete opposite: not nearly enough good members joining, and too much real upload!