The Rise of Identity Theft on Steemit.
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Clearly a verified user.
You may remember in my last post here, I had a brief message on how our community has the potential to degrade if we do not do something to stop the rampant abuse. I mentioned only briefly the case of identity theft, and how this could become a huge issue in our future. Well.
Identity Theft is Already Rampant.
This afternoon I was improving @cheetah. I generally monitor my bot, in hopes to find authors (before they get pissed at me). I noticed one post just barely slip under my detection, so I thought I would manually check, and sure enough, a large portion was plagiarized. But that's not all.
Here is the post.
When I see repeat offenders, I generally check the post history. And look at that, it seems the introductory post was also identity theft.
Just another average day in steemit for me -- but that didn't stop my investigation, and I am glad I didn't. I searched the bittrex memo 71867115fc444f2bb8c, and come across a familiar face.
@kateadventure. You may remember this this post here, wherein @corinnestokes followed up on cheetah bot's catch, noting the account to be fake. But that isn't the only account using that memo. I also found @juanitalee as well. This person has taken over $2,000 from our community. And both @dantheman and @ned upvoted the identity theft.
That makes three, making this possibly our first serial identity thief.
EDIT: it looks like there is a fourth too.
Now when I see a post like this, where the user belays verifying, I am scared. Scared because it is now acceptable to welcome people to our community with hundreds of dollars, and this is getting continuously abused with fake accounts.
Here two more identity theft cases I have caught:
In case you don't believe me.
There are plenty more.
That is 5 examples of identity theft in this post that I can pull out of my hat before I even look through the cheetah log. This is a huge problem.
We need a proper verification channel, and we need to start being careful. Developers take note, and community take note. This is getting serious.
Since this is also highly illegal, I encourage bittrex and poloniex to follow up on this.
Here's the bittrex memo:
71867115fc444f2bb8c
And their poloniex memo:
4aaad7172fa0a3e8
The whole "introduceyourself" thing was fun and worthwhile a month ago but now that we're being flooded with more people than we could ever remember or keep track of, perhaps its time to put that little tradition to rest.
I agree.
share your opinion on that. its time to move on
"Introduceyourself" will live as long as people make money from it.
I disagree. The introduction post is an essential part of entering this community.
I feel that if we couple the the introduction with a solid verification system of some sort that will get to know each other while stopping the rampant identity theft that Cheetah has already discovered.
As an aside, I felt that my introduction post was so important that I'm still working on mine. Stay tuned, Steemians!
Faking a name is NOT identity theft. Djeezes, what. The. Fuck. I'm sorry, nothing personal. I'm just gonna stop reading these comments.
Any reasonably serious blogger will post something about themselves for a variety of reasons. I am not sure we CAN get rid self introductions nor am I sure that we should, even if we could.
Rather, user verification probably needs to be taken more seriously. Far more serious than simply posting a selfie of yourself holding a sign in your hand showing the date. That is not really verification, it does NOT make the account trustworthy and it is reckless to indicate to anyone that it does. This is probably the old tradition that should be put to rest because it can easily be used to falsely give assurance about a user identity.
There are lots of techniques for verifying users, Captcha, multi-factor authentication, Email verification, you all know how Ebay and PayPal works... Bank Account verification by submitting a charge of .01. Steemit may wish to implement some of these features and others soon.
I agree with your over all point and hope to see it rectified.
You really want Steemit to deploy the rectal probe on new users? Why?
See also https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@r4fken/why-i-think-dan-s-recent-opinion-piece-on-the-catfish-phenomenon-is-just-plain-wrong
The community needs to be careful about what they upvote. It should seem incredible that all the women on this site look like models! Think. In an average day in a city, how many people look like that? If it's too good to be true, don't upvote. And if they don't mak
I cannot do this alone! We need your help!
I am really trying, cheetah.
I check the new posts a lot and its getting ridiculous the amount of fakes and impersinators. Many post links from all of the different social media platforms to make it more believable.
Identity theft is nothing to joke about and these newcomers who think they can abuse the system should face consequences or get flagged. The worst part is that real and genuine users get no love when 5 other ones that may be fake spam up the section and take space. And the absolute worst part is imagine your friend one day signing up to Steemit and to later realize some random person has been pretending to be them all along on here.
I really think we need more minnows frequenting the new section of atleast the introduction posts. To welcome the real users with open arms while at the same time flag abusers.
I even created the #verified channel on slack today because of this exact problem and have made a thread to make users understand why verifying your intro posts is important: https://steemit.com/newcomers/@acidyo/what-verifying-your-account-in-introduceyourself-means-and-what-it-doesn-t-necessarily-have-to-mean
I am waiting for the day when my votes will have more value to welcome newcomers properly.
I'll Upvote any comment asking non-verified user to verify their identity
I'll Downvote any blog from a user who's not verified
Eh Africa, I am sure I m not verified.... so what would it take ? I just a small ou bal on the Southern most tip of Africa (well almost :) )...what exactly would be an acceptable verification procedure?
That is the problem isnt it? How do we really verify people? Will be a hard task, and there is always scammers out there.
Save us cheetah! You are a hero. I will try to do my part.
Make them verify or GTFO? Maybe that needs to be implemented for a little while. We need to get tough on this before waves of con-men and women start copying travel blogs.
You think a verified person can't copy stories?
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@r4fken/why-i-think-dan-s-recent-opinion-piece-on-the-catfish-phenomenon-is-just-plain-wrong
Thank you @cheetah!
This person looks like a serial copycat. I think I caught him before the post took off and I tagged you in the post, but I don't know if you got the chance to see it. This is the post in question: https://steemit.com/steemit/@bitcoin-novosti/ccedk-and-steemit-bring-crowdfunding-to-projects-corner#@jaysanz/re-bitcoin-novosti-ccedk-and-steemit-bring-crowdfunding-to-projects-corner-20160726t084912631z
Flagged the post, Up Voted your comment on the post.
Well Done!
We need a DOWNVOTE bot to alert ordinary users!
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Here is my answer to this post and my solution to the problem https://steemit.com/steemit/@kuriko/response-to-the-rise-of-identity-theft-on-steemit-here-s-my-solution-to-the-problem-anyx-ned-dan
The incentives for frauds to steal identities and pass themselves off as someone else are huge.
The rewards associated with an impressive looking #introduceyourself post are massive. A fraudster can make many attempts and only needs to get lucky once to net a significant bounty.
The only way this changes is by changing our attitudes to introductory posts. Yes a good introduction is nice however verification and building a reputation on Steemit needs to be valued higher.
Verification
As I've stated previously, the whole #introduceyourself tag was borne out of a request for verification. I love that it has become this wonderful social thing, however I'd prefer if we looked introductory as someone laying down their marker. "I've said I'm so and so...", here is the proof.
Reputation
More important than the verification is has the person gone on to build a reputation on Steemit and bring value to the platform or have they just used the introductory post as a quick money grab? Verified or not, there have been many that have made hundreds of dollars on their first post and haven't been seen since. Whilst we can look to fancy technical solutions to these issues, we should start by valuing solid contributors as highly as we value new faces. It may even be time to consider adding reputation markers against names so people can read their existing post or comment in light of the work that has preceded it.
We should welcome new adopters however the rewards for being new are perhaps a bit too skewed. We need to help @anyx unearth the frauds. However we also need to show that this is the home of valuable original content, not just a place to show your face to swell your coffers.
Here's another. Appears to be a forged introduction picture.
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@moquinn3/come-euro-trippin-with-me
When you look at the picture with the "Hello Steemit" paper in it, you'll notice that the shading of the paper seems a bit weird. To me, it doesn't look natural.
So, I viewed the metadata of the image to see if there were traces of anything and sure enough photoshop has left traces.
See for yourself: http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&imgurl=http://i.imgsafe.org/803425704c.jpg
I suppose the user could have processed their image in photoshop, but why? Any ideas?
Definitely faked! Well spotted, I have flogged and encouraged others to do so.
Please flag as well...
Awesome site by the way!
Cg
Yep, there's another case.. :/
Why? To make quick profit...
Man I should really use that tool that shows traces in the future, I thought it was real in that thread... lesson learned.
Great job, Ben!
I am not sure how you and the others here have concluded this is a fake. There are certainly lots of reason as to why a Blogger would own and use PhotoShop regularly with every single image they post. I know I certainly use PhotoShop on every image I post. BLoggers do this for lots of reasons. Make yourself look thinner, more tan, erase a pimple, remove red-eye flash, cropping, color correction... There are plenty of legit reasons to use PhotoShop in a blog.
Exactly! I use Pixlr all the time... Even if it's just to crop.
In my opinion the gradation of light to shadow from left to right matches the outdoors to indoors transition. She is out the window and as you get more out of the window you will naturally have more light and as you get closer to inside it will be a bit darker.
I think that using photoshop to manipulate a photo isn't out of the norm since I regularly will import a scanned image to photoshop rather than use the software that came with the scanner or will just drag and drop a picture from my camera in to PS to crop it, reduce it's size, etc. If it's from a raw file I will surely have to convert it in some app so it's going to get manipulated in something like lightroom or whatever. I'm sure many others are the same.
I agree that it certainly could be faked, but it's pretty well done if it is and couldn't say with any certainty this one is.
Below is one of "her" blogs, the poorly worded English is a massive clue; also she ignored repeated requests to prove her identity.
>LGBT we know now is approved in the United States and almost many major countries.
that so the problem is frequent bullying in social media and scare some LGBT person
I want to make-voting in this post
if you accept the LGBT community please vote or comment below
if you do not accept LGBT if not you can downvote or comment below
the result will I display on my blog and the entire LGBT community in social media
may help steemit develops also if the result is positive
cheers guys !!
Hello, what is the acronym LGBT stand for?
You know. Lesbian, gay, bi, transgender. Pretty much any non heterosexual. Used to define their community.
Thanks Nando83 ... I lost the context there.. obviously been a long day !!
This is awesome. This gives me so much hope for the future of this platform and community. I've been hanging out in the steemitabuse Slack channel (sorry to those who didn't get in early) for a while now, and I'm impressed every day with @anyx's efforts to protect this community and expose provable examples of fraud and injustice. There are so many people working behind the scenes, often without the blessing or support from the official Steemit, Inc team, to improve our community. @anyx is one of those and has asked to be recognized as a witness. If you haven't yet, I suggest you support that request with your vote. @nextgencrypto has also been building bots to protect us from other bots which are trying to scam the system for profit. There are many others including @pfunk, @jamtaylor, @bacchist, @smooth, @firepower, and more who are working around the clock and, in many ways, going unnoticed. I'm glad posts like this are being noticed now.
This is an amazing experiment so far, and I'm so stoked to be a part of it. :)
Yeah, I definitely want to shout out to those people. Those you listed, and some others are @recursive @ash @pharesim @neoxian, and many more. I am glad that our community is starting to take a stance.
Yes! Thank you. I knew I'd miss some important names and, as you said, there are many more as well.
It's literally a paid position that's needed here it seems. Someone full time following up this stuff... but how would the community compensate them? Could we agree to upvote their weekly posts detailing the frauds they've uncovered and exposed? If we did that, someone would have a nice little job there.
The platform has a mechanism for paying for upgrades and maintenance already: a witness position. An interesting question then becomes: should witnesses be doing this? But the stake is there.
Someone could either campaign for a witness seat on the premise of addressing this issue, or work together with an existing witness to work on the problem?
I am actually already a backup witness (see here), so it's part of my duty to care. :)
Exactly why we should lend @anyx our vote.
@anyx is obviously passionate about this. I hope @dan can get him on the team.
Here is a solution to eliminate bots ! what do you think ?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@fogspam/things-that-steemit-should-implement-to-eliminate-multiple-accounts-bots-upvoting-groups-garbage-posts-etc
It's a simple solution, no more upvotes for introduce yourself posts and boobs. Period.
No matter how awesome the person is, we just leave them our "welcome home bud!" or "nice tits!" in the comments and that's it. Everyone is cashing in on the gullible, even the legit and "verified" accounts, and they better start contributing something beyond a few selfies before Steemit drops thousands in their pockets.
@anyx, I so appreciate what you have done here in tracking this all down and bringing it to everyone's attention! Thank you so much for all the effort you have put in to guard the Steemit community. I'm glad to see you have been rewarded with some nice payouts :) Keep it up! As for me, I will continue to do my part and look for further cases of identity theft. I hope others will too. #doyourpart
The community needs to be careful about what they upvote. It should seem incredible that all the women on this site look like models! Think. In an average day in a city, how many people look like that? If it's too good to be true, don't upvote. And if they don't make any money, they'll go away.
I personally think there are two things happening here:
I was thinking about proposing a way to make this process safer. If it were for all of us to use a certain tag like #exposed or something, post our findings under this tag with the reason why we think certain posts are fake. Then whales would have it easier for them to spot such fake attempts and kill those theft attempts.
The thing here is that the whales have to agree with this and officially say they will follow a certain tag to find and penalize fake posts. Otherwise the impact is a drop in the sea. I am noting here the attempts at curation by @positive, who was doing at one point a reward system for people that found fake posts and catfishes and helped curate them. There was also an initiative to do this by mentioning the tag #moderation, but I think that died also.
Keep in mind that the devs, Dan, Ned, are now 99% focused on security and stability. Once those processes are matured enough, they will also start getting involved in other things like moderation guidance. Until then, it's up to individuals like you and like me.
@anyx: superb job with @cheetah, don't stop, keep making it better. I also applaud you following the #doyourpart initiative!