Managers and vote maniplulation

Recently we had an open discussion about the role of sellers on AGW and that lead to new rules for those who sell. What it also lead to was a lot of reports of vote maniplulation, and of a seller manager approaching women who post on AGW as a business opportunity. And as TheRealOQ and I started looking at this deeper and more information came in to us from various sources including from moderators of other subs and trusted members of the community, it became very apparent that for the most part, they were often inextricably linked.We didn't want to act on this immediately until we had enough proof to satisfy ourselves. What we know is a manager contacts women who are presumingly doing well on AGW with a business proposion. That he will sign them to contracts and will organize posting strategies for them on social media, websites, and AGW, in exchange for a good portion of their earnings and control of their accounts. They will also have the "support" of the group of sellers, each promoting each other. This is where the vote manipulation begins.The main way of vote manipulation is by posting links of their AGW/Reddit posts to their social media and Discord. This is usually done through the use of a bot. The idea behind this is to get their followers to go and vote for their post to get it moving and trending towards "hot" so that it has a better position on AGW, and in turn gets a better advertising position. If they really wanted their followers to see the picture they posted, they could just post the picture. This is an effort to gain more upvotes. Even looking when posts by this group are made, it's obvious they are chosen for maximum benefit.The second way of vote manipulation is influencing the vote for Poster of the Month. Asking their followers on Discord to vote for them, to vote for other sellers in the group, and even offering special rewards for proof of votes in PotM. It even went so far as bragging how much their sales went up when they won. If one looks at the Posters of the Month for the past year or so, a large portion are posters involved in this selling group.This all implicitly breaks Reddit's rules against vote maniplution here. https://ift.tt/2VYgFqR are even more troubling aspects of this seller group that we won't get into, but we warn women who are thinking of selling about signing contracts handing over their earnings and personal information to someone else. Many sellers (some of the biggest) did it on their own. With Onlyfans, this is becoming popular and way too easy, and it's also becoming too easy for opportunists to use AGW as their own personal recruiting ground to make money off of others.So we have decided to ban known sellers that are part of, or associated with, this selling group, as well as known posters who have manipulated votes, and we will continue to look at anyone else who might be doing this or something similar.We still really want to make these new seller rules work because there are a lot of great posters among them. But in the end, we can't have others manipulating the system for their benefit, and someone with a manager, paying for selling strategies, and being a part of a selling group cannot be considered an amateur anymore.