Hi Jessie, welcome to Steemit!
Do you think you could make a verification photo or quick video? That way we can confidently give you upvotes knowing that you're not some dude in his basement posting someone else's photos :-)
Edit: You don't have to, it's always your choice of course.
Is it mandatory to do so?
No, nothing is mandatory. It is just encouraged, because we give out real money and sometimes scammers get in on it. Ultimately it's your blog, your choice, your rules, but we get to decide what we reward in payouts.
Back in July we foolishly gave nearly $5000 for this post. We want to reward real content creators, without encouraging such things.
The girl in that post has a verification photo right? Still it turned out to be scam. Then what's the point of verification if it could be cheated.
Video verification is stronger, pretty hard to fake. Everyone was caught up in the mania back then and didn't do their due diligence.
We can't stop 100% of scams, we just want to make them succeed more rarely.