Hello Guys! Welcome to the first episode of my blog series where I expose the best cheat.... I mean coders that are popular among us. I am planning to release further episodes in this series based on thorough research along with the evidences (If this blog isn't taken down unlike the ones that were initially written against big names like Psychotic_D).
In today's episode, our celebrity star is the most popular Indian DSA coach, striver_79 aka Raj Vikramaditya. If you are a coder from India, it is impossible that you don't know this guy. For those of you who aren't Indian, THIS IS HIS YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Although a lot of the content on his channel is free, this guy has minted a lot of money from the people who are beginners in DSA or preparing for placements by selling his courses. I am not here to comment on his business strategies of first giving something for free and then selling his services like referrals and courses here (if you don't know he is a Google employee who sells referrals to Google and is one of the most tagged Indian in DSA related LinkedIn posts). The main topic of this blog is going to be about how he built his empire of scams on the most common scam of this platform — CHEATING!
Claim: Raj Vikramaditya aka Striver became a Candidate Master by cheating in multiple if not all contests and eventually used this "milestone" as a source of credibility to build his empire.
Evidences:-
An initial look at his profile won't bother you much. But if you paste his username in Codeforces Visualizer, you see something like THIS. Notice that grey patch over there? That's the percentage of skipped solutions! But that's just 0.9% maybe he just cheated in one or two right?
Well a deeper look at his profile suggests something else. In fact the skipped solutions are so much that it took me another screenshot to show them all.
Judging from the dates when he got skipped, it seems like he got skipped at 8 contests! The contests too are so dispersed that we can't say he used to be a cheater who got on the right track. NO! THIS GUY GOT SKIPPED CONTESTS FROM 2017 TO 2019!!!
And it looks he deliberately wanted to push ranks to be credible. Look at the contest on 19-August 2018 in his skipped submissions. He jumped to Candidate Master in that one before getting the skip. A similar one can be seen when he tried to cheat his way to specialist. You can also notice he stopped giving contests after becoming CM because he got that "credibility" to fool the public and to get into Google. What's more concerning is these are only the instances when the instances of his cheating were blatant enough to be caught. From what I have seen, cheaters are only caught when they aren't careful enough to change their codes. That's like 1 in 10 instances (more when they are at the brinks of a new rank and are desperate for a push because then they even copy codes they don't understand and end up leaving a crucial detail). But even if we ignore those, it is safe to assume he cheated in at least 70 contests(being very conservative here. The plagarism checker back then was much worse than today and I am quoting this number as of today) to be caught in 8 (he isn't dumb enough to not change the leaked code and get caught in every contest he cheated in). So of all the contests in his profile, at least half (or maybe all) of his contests are cheated.
Final Message: If you are an Indian who is a fan of this guy (which you most probably are if you are an Indian), not every of your online teachers/coaches are clean. Some of them have a dark patch you haven't seen yet. Don't fall for the number of subscribers, rating or popularity. This mindset creates more cheaters like him who eventually scam you like he does. If someone builds a business out of lie, don't expect them to be honest while selling their services. Next time when you tag Striver in your post, remember promoting a cheater makes you no better than them. Maybe you don't cheat but is having a cheater as your idol or mentor any better?
If anyone from google is reading this feel free to research about his referral business :)
