My fellow Steemians, what do you see in this picture? No, not the green grass... the two sheep looking silly. Are you like them? I sure hope not.
Spammers and scammers have a talent for originality on Steemit. Spammers have been plaguing the platform for a while, they're annoying but in general harmless. Flagging them reduces their visibility and shakes them up a bit to stop their annoyance (if they ever do).
Scammers on the other hand are more insidious and dangerous. Why? Because scammers want your money, and will go through many lengths to get it.
Resteemers
From what I've seen so far, scammers are gathering a lot of followings with a bot/script, then they start spamming their list with a memo asking people for money in return for a resteem. Although many of those people were reported to the @steemcleaners or the steemitabuse channel, they continue their pestering. Usually they ask between 0.5 to 2 SBD to have your post resteemed, while their reputation is zero! It doesn't take a Ph.D. in Steem Studies to realize that someone with a zero reputation has zero credibility. So before you send them money, check their blog first. Besides, everyone can resteem and it's FREE to begin with. So why pay money to someone to get a free service out of them? Can you smell the 💩?
The most famous resteemers: @joanofalt @carlobelgado @jones420 @bago @bilalhaider.
Impostors
This is the recent method for scammers: impersonation. They come onto the Steemit.Chat while impersonating a big whale or a successful blogger, such as @sweetsssj, @gavvet, etc... Then they ask for 10 SBD, or more, for a $100 upvote! They ask that the money be transferred directly into their Bittrex.com account. One particular scammer(s) was using this memo: d9bc272057644832bea.
They are targeting users individually in a private message, while acting friendly to sell their crap. Sadly, many newbies have fallen for that trick and are daily reporting and complaining about wasting their funds.
First of all, would you trust someone on the street coming up to you and promising a 10:1 return on your investment, while pretending to be Bill Gates? Of course not.
Second, whales will never EVER ask anyone for anything, they have their own investment in Steem Power or have a successful blog. They didn't build their reputation and SP by chatting and begging. It's difficult for minnows to distinguish who's who on Steemit. It takes time to know the whales and discover what they do.
Savior
This is an original one, surfaced today. Pretending to be @adm and offering to help people with their blacklisted account by asking for their account and password! Really!?
Ironically, one of the targets in those screenshots, stephenp888, is none other than our favorite flooder @bilalhaider (with a different username or course).
If you read my post about account security, you should know by now to NOT GIVE YOUR PASSWORD to anyone.
Power of Common Sense
The old grandma advice of not talking to strangers still holds true. If you're a newbie, please be careful. Don't be seduced by the promise of a quick buck, because that's exactly what these scammers are doing. Your success is dictated by the quality of your blog and your dedication, not buying your way in.
Don't be a sheep. Be smart. Use your common sense. If you suspect someone trying to swindle you, ask around about them on the chat and report them in the steemitabuse channel on the chat.
Please report those impostors as soon as possible on the chat so we can block them.
And I repeat this for the millionth time... NEVER GIVE YOUR PASSWORD TO ANYONE.
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I just removed someone today...he wasn't so much of a scammer as a common leech. I just dislike it when people offer reestems for $. But then when you look closely their reestem ain't worth nothing anyway. I mean yes....they have a bunch of followers but mostly dead ones or no one really looks at their posts.
Hence, the scam. Besides, anyone can resteem and it's FREE to begin with. Speaking of which, I should add that to the post.
Hmmm...so these people should be reported? I mean...this guy doesn't really impersonate anyone. And he will reestem afterall. But for a small price. :D
Thanks for warning us. :)
useful for me as a newcomer, thanks for sharing and informing,
Fucking Cunts! that's what they are!
You can tell them that if they try to message you 🤣
Crazy, i reestem for nothing, basically if i like and voted for the post. In my short stay here (22 days) i haven't paid for any service.
If you want me to reestem any post just tell me and ill gladly do it, no fees or SBD required, just reply my comments :-) im always reading the reply section. Remember @cama73ven.
What a nice thing to say. You get an up-vote from me for that. And if you ever feel like re-steeming any of my current posts, I would be most grateful.
Done :-) reestemed this post
Glad to help anyone, my price? a simple free reply.
LOL... this is NOT my article that you up-voted, but I'm sure the original poster appreciates it. Like you, I'm just making comments here. I liked your attitude and I gave you my support.
Let me explain why your reply is important to me, since my posts are not so good (im slowly improving) yet the comment strategy has been so far my main source of income here. I tried to upvote but my sp is too low, not to mention the consume of voting power.
Also by commenting and replying the reputation increases too, those are for me very good reasons to mix post original content, comment and reply; upvoting not so much, at least until i got certain level where it can do something useful (0.001 - 0.003 from upvoting vs 0.04 to 0.450 or more just by commenting or posting)
I haven't checked recently to see if I'm finally a minnow yet or if I'm still considered a Redfish, but I know how fast those 10 100% votes get used up. Without a slider, I need to be careful how many times I vote per day. I try to give everyone who participates on my games and contests a full-power up-vote. It's not much, but every little bit helps. As for commenting, I found it is still bringing in about 80% of my earnings. I just recently had one (for me) huge pay-out that is skewing that statistic, but it will soon return to about 75% to 80%. So keep doing what you are doing. Eventually you gain a bit more Steem Power and your votes start generating a few cents. And it just builds from there.
So, do you want that slide bar? easy, install tampermonkey and add this script. I took the information from here but modified the script so we all can use the slidebar. This is the original script. After install the script close and restart your chrome / chromium browser :-)
I have the slide bar thanks to this but still with 100% the payout is still too low. I'm sure you'll appreciate and like the bar and give it better use. Enjoy.
Ah, so you understand all that code, huh? Nice!
Just yesterday a new Chrome extension was announced. Perhaps you could check it out and leave a review as to how safe it is and how it compares to the above script? It seems easier to add a Chrome extension than to add Tampermonkey and then add your own script there.
I saw the link, looks good but you must provide the private posting WIF, with the script there is no need to provide any WIF.
Ancient Fauxmiskatonic saying:
The gods must love gullible people - they made so many of them.
I can't BELIEVE there are such gullible people out there who would fall for this resteem service. I mean, c'mon!.......btw, please do NOT look at the recent transactions in my wallet....Mkay? Let's just all pretend it never happened.
It's the T&C's maybe? (They skipped reading it? hehehe)
Great article. Thanks for the heads' up to all the minnows. Someone like me would NEVER fall for that kind of scam. I'm far too seasoned to get tricked into something like this. Everyone KNOWS how vital a reputation score is. Duh....
P.S. Whatever you do, do NOT look at the recent transactions in my wallet.........[insert nervous laugh here]
Giggitty...
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STOPHi @drakos, you're absolutely right here, shame on the scammy bastards! Especially those that already have all the money they need and are preying on minnows.
Thanks for the warnings. I was targeted twice by the resteem bots in first week, they sent me fraction of SBD and I followed them, Thanks to your list, I can now go back and unfollow this leeches. I am glad I never used their service.
The 0.001 SBD (or STEEM) is the minimal amount required for a transaction, aka dust transaction. They didn't send you that to be generous. Also, it's a way to send someone a memo on Steemit. So, with 1 SBD they can memo spam 1000 users, if 10% of *uninformed users respond to their scam with 1 SBD, that gives them 100 SBD! Quite a ROI.
So, all the followers of those scammers would see 100 resteems in their feed, on top of their own followings. The likelihood of anyone voting for those resteems becomes narrow. So there is no guarantee those resteems will work.
This is why those scammers have 10-80k followings to target, they need volume spam to hook a few minnows 🐟, which they successfully do, if you look at their wallet history.
Thanks for the information and pointing out that being messaged in chat is one way they try and catch you.
So maybe we should encourage using a more secure platform for DMs and group chats like Wire?
I'm not a technical person, so sounds good but I have never used Wire.
Wise words and as this platform expands it will of course only get worse, new members will always be easy bait for these type of cons - with little experience and a desire to grow quickly it will always seem a viable option. All we can do is try to share our own experiences and ways to progress safely in the hope to educate and protect the growing audience.
I've found the 'flag' button very useful in both comments and posts. :)
ty drakos / new follower / peace
Great post kingscrown was being approached in the same method. Hopefully nobody is sending money.
Yes I was around when that happened, he was screenshot'ing it for us 😃
Awesome post! Thank you @drakos! I am bookmarking it for future reference.
@drakos very informative post thankyou
Thank you so much for informing us !
Really appreciate your effort @drakos !!
Ooops just used a resteem service for 0.5 SBD to see if it works.. lol.
But it was just once to test and its reputation is 48 actually.
Your last paragraph : scammer being scammed ahaha!
thanks @drakos for looking out for us! resteeming
Thank you so much for this especially because newbies like me are still a bit confused with how the system works and all ...proud of what you do too
Very helpful. Thanks @drakos
A very nice work and I will continue to follow you and you also follow me ... Have we agreed @bakabou159704
I read the T&Cs before signing up, and was glad that there has been a reminder about password security (it's so secure...you cannot use 'forgotten your password' like other platforms!)
Just like cleaning up a Netflix account (rating all films on there so you only see the ones that you have liked), I'm currently spending time muting accounts...and once I get there...I think my home page (new posts!) would look very nice. at the moment the ratio of finding a post I'd likely read is 20:1 --- I'm hoping to cut that ratio in half.