)
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!
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.
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.
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!
Learn more about the steem rules Here.
I would appreciate if you would read this Post https://steemit.com/steemit/@minion/the-steemit-qr-code-making-this-world-a-better-place
I think it's a great idea and that It could be REVOLUTIONARY!
Thank you for reading and please comment!
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.
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!
This is definitely an issue that needs more awareness and needs to be addressed ASAP. As I have mentioned in another thread, I believe that #introduceyourself posts should be exempt from receiving rewards. While it's nice to see the faces of people of the platform, it's the quickest money grabber there is on Steem, it's the most abused, and where I believe most of the fraud is happening. Add on to that that #introduceyourself post add no valuable content. People are getting paid to explain their either horrible circumstances or their awesome life.
Personally, I bet most of the female posts are fake. I've never seen a platform built on such nerdy technology (I mean this in a good way) attract this many good looking women. I'm willing to bet many of the posts are models paid to send a picture with "Steemit" with the date and time.
The astronaut post was upvoted really quickly earlier today before a commenters called the image out for being photoshopped. I mean, it was obviously too good to be true, especially because it as a very high caliber individual. Imagine how easy it is to act as someone else with the millions of images available on the internet. A little bit of photoshop and creative writing and you can score big on here. It's pretty sad, honestly.
Thanks for your post and bringing more light to the issue. We need to get moving fast as we can on this. I appreciate the effort you put in to get your bots working as well. Any help is good for the platform's growth.
Oh yeah, this post: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@jesika/i-was-raped-on-my-wedding-night
It's made $1600+ and guess what. It's fake.
Original Content: https://www.quora.com/How-does-it-feel-to-have-sex-with-your-spouse-on-your-wedding-night-when-he-she-is-a-stranger/answers/2400693?srid=hVXC
"And both @dantheman and @ned upvoted the identity theft." totally understand why, it is nearly impossible for a human being to catch this. This bot you have is awesome! I really appreciate this. I wrote a small post a week or so ago about this issue in general that stayed at minnow level and it amazing to me how the issue has now come fully into the forefront with strong whale support. This site is really starting to blow my mind. I had the normal days of doubt, not anymore-------> this community is for real!
I guess we need a serious mega-whale designated as 'the executioner' who can come in and squash the value in fraudulent posts, then lead the other mega whales to do the same.
This wild west basically needs a few more Sheriffs and a reliable communication network that leads to justice being carried out.
Good on you @anyx, your Cheetah bot is doing good work (and I'm not a bot commenting fan usually).
Superb job catching these posts! I'm sure more people will now see the work you do and that of your bot. Wish you the best on Steemit! :)
that's why if they don't show at least a piece of paper with steemit written on it I automatically assume they are fake.
Identity theft is a crime. Devs could even pass on their details to authorities.
Carefull with the photoshope wizzardz
#jokez #notme
source image:
On a serious note thank you for fighting against Spam and plagiarism. If it wasnt for your bot @cheetah I would of upvoted some of them and would have never of guessed they were plagiarized.
no me bill gate !!!
I think this one might be a fake.
There's so much of it, there really is. That's why checking out which posts cheetah tags is incredibly helpful.
At the same time cheetah can't be everywhere. All it really takes is a few seconds with Google to see if something's been posted elsewhere for the most part.
If a post seems too professional, it's a good candidate to check out. If it's too formal, that's another good clue. Finally, if it reads like a news post, that's pretty much a dead giveaway.
Still, quite a few people on Steemit are professional writers, so you can't always rely on that. Sometimes you gotta go with your gut. If something seems hinky, do a little sniffing.
sorry replied to the wrong person.
@anyx
This is already essentially a solved problem in academia, students cheat on high stakes papers all the time. There are ways to detect plagarism quicker, easier and less expensive than what I believe your current method is.
I don't know any other way to contact you, but I don't want to publicize this information because while it would give cheetah an edge; If the plagarists are listening then they could use it to game the system making it impossible for cheetah to detect them.
If you could email me
admin@steembots.com
I would really appreciate the opportunity
to help you turn this...
into this..
Thank you for the heads-up and important information concerning this rampant problem. Take good care, thrive on and namaste :)
I don't think Identity theft will be much of an issue on Steemit.
Took me a moment, I didn't just LOL though. You all owe me a new keyboard!
Coffee, it's everywhere!
Beautiful.
You're not bad yourself. ;)
Funkin hilarious !!!
this is the best thing I've ever seen on the internet.
Having to deal with this situation on other platforms i find it easy to identify. You will also (if you know what your looking for) see fake steemit cards edited into the image, and they achieving verification in the eyes of many steemit users. Unless users are educated somehow of the basics things to look for with any form of theft, then it will continue and only get worse. I can only be 100% sure the account is legitimate if i see that user in a video with steemit cards etc. The other cases where the account is verified with another user which is known to the community.
But these "Serial Fraudsters" will always slip through unless we as a community become more aware, and like Anyx has stated a "Proper Verification Channel. I would like to offer my help voluntarily if i can. I spent the better half of 2 years everyday hunting thieves in a virtual world that were stealing images/files creating fake accounts etc. It is something i enjoy and get satisfaction from.
Have you considering adding some kind of notifications to your bot? It could work by letting users register an email and an account, and you could then send an email if that user votes on a post you've flagged. Or, even better, you could integrate with telegram or slack and let users register for notifications there.
Either way this is awesome work, please keep it up.
Thanks @rainman, I and a few other awesome people in the #steemitabuse channel have been talking about exactly this. Providing either a live feed or a summary every few hours (one suggestion to even make a post or notif on every catch, but that would be a heck of a lot of spam, cheetah caught someone while I'm writing this comment.)
Feel free to pop in and chat if you have ideas!
I agree with you, this is turning into a serious problem.
It's one thing to have a free and open platform here, but with this much identity theft already there needs to be some sort of framework set in place here to prevent people from literally defrauding honest users and walking away with massive amounts of cash from plagiarized content.
There are plenty of plagiarism checkers that exist online - CopyScape is one, and Grammarly I believe has that functionality as well - which might be something to consider integrating into posting. Barring that, maybe limit new members' ability to post/comment/upvote until they verify their identity?
The former seems like it would be an expensive, logistical nightmare, while the latter would have too much of a chilling effect on new membership.
Cheetah and bots like it are a great idea, but there's only so much they - and their developers - can do without the support of the community. I'm talking full support here, actively looking for and rooting out plagiarism whenever you see it - especially when it comes to identity theft. There's too much at risk, and too much to potentially lose, to not be hypervigilant.
I think there is also another one.
So tell me what you guys think. Well known steemer with probably close to 100K in articles, mostly compilations. I think he had like the 3rd or 4th highest paid article ever.
Im in his introduceyourself thread today, and I notice that, although he claims to not come form the us, he talks like an american. Just little things... but it strikes me as weird.
Hes barely visible in his photo.
He has two pictures of his hometown. One is from a hotel website. One is from a newspaper story. THough he doesnt say explicitly that he took these photos, its strongly implied through context.
Am I being totally paranoid here?
This was bound to happen on a new unmoderated community. Luckily, these small time conmen looking to make a quick buck never succeed. Kudos to your bot on detecting stolen content. Helps us flag down offending posts.
The #introduceyourself exploit is very clever and cynical.
Not just from a plagiarism standpoint but indeed social engineering the hole can of worms that is "gender politics".
If someone downvotes or publicly criticises an article about rape or abuse, however politely, they can be very quickly jumped on by various people invested in the story. Said persons may have the best intentions, or may indeed be in cahoots with the OP. I suspect the latter is often the case.
I recently posted a comment on an an article in the minefield that is the #introduceyourself tag - I politely suggested the OP should provide some verification, considering her (unverified) introduction to the whole Steemit platform was a very grim tale indeed. I was quickly met with a barrage of hate from, for want of a better term "white knights". They went as far as going to my profile, downvoting a lot of my recent posts, and commenting on my posts that I was a faggot, loser, etc.
So, I backed off. I tried to do the right thing, and I got my ass harassed.
So, from now on... I'm done with being mister principled. People can vote for stupid shit if they want. They can make some scammer rich, it's none of my business.
What needs to change most is the culture of how people Upvote.
Excellent work!
keep checking
we've too much fake or annoying content.
If you need help for the italian language, don't hesitate to ask.
Thank you for doing this investigation. I will attempt to internalize your lessons on how we can help and try to do my part. This is important.
I authenticated myself using my Blockstack identity https://onename.com/scalextrix , hardly anyone seemed to care at the time.
By the way, I finally heard back from the real Adventurous Kate (Kate McCulley). As we all knew she would, she confirmed that @kateadventure is NOT her.
good work on cheetah 8]
These people rip off our community! Meanwhile I have been blogging and getting very few votes. :( Got to come up with some catchier topics, titles and pics. Thank you and @Cheetah for all the hard work.
Yup. @Cheetah was off duty for a bit and like a thunderbolt my content was ripped and reposted, it wasn't even on youtube proper yet but the user has the nerve to say he 'just found it'..
Being that I personally love the work of Big man Tyrone, an internet legend and proponent of entrepeneurship and passionate business, hence I got him to commission me (all of us, really) a Steemit video.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@spookypooky/i-commissioned-video-legend-big-man-tyrone-to-promote-steemit
Sadly, as you can see in the comment I made in my post later, it was perhaps a bit 'too interesting' for its own good. Easy money for impostors..
Thanks so much for the work against theft and plagiarism so far @Anyx, keep it up with @Cheetah !
In every platform,there is always a glitch needs to be fixed. That person is simple talented in a way of stealing others identity and profiting from it. And since that steemit suits for their skills and its new, theyre taking the initiative to abuse and destroy it. @anyx Youre one of kind person who is willing to spent delicate time just to get rid of identity thieves. And as an ordinary steemer here, Im taking my #doyourpart move in order to make this community sustainable and efficient.
All thru the way!!
hello
We should make users confirm their identity before they make transactions with their wallet! There are lots of ways to do this that dont require having more than a working camera on hand. You can still handle extreme cases if there really is no camera around case by case if necessary.. @dantheman @dan
Why would people bother identifying themselves in a moderated identifying channel when they end up with close to nothing vs thèse scanners with multiple identities. The real guilty people are the ones blinddlessly jumping in with their 500$ up votes. Just like esteemed who invite a post claiming to be from a 14 years old girl without any proof of identity.
Verification or GTFO!
Catfish is on the rise , people do anything to get huge money here , when the original person get nothing that pros and cons abput social media . we need police call the policee !
That was my first thought when visiting this site, is it just one big catfish from the creator. The second If it is a scam if enough people use it will it eventually become legitimate.
But how about @cheetah himself ? He got an identity ? He a bot lol .
@cheetah is a bot, though I have a feeling the creator sometimes posts with him.
That meme make me speechless. Fullstop now
:p
I can't understand why people would do this s eventually they will be caught and hopefully punished
🤓
As soon as someone finds a way to make money, someone else will try to find a way to take it away. I'm new to this community, but I did wonder how plagiarism would be handled on the site. Thanks for the heads-up!
hello!!! this is introdouself?
big problem
Hope they respond on time.
But what can a minnow like me do? should i flag or report any kind of suspicious activity?
Flagging works wonders, it really does.
They are out in full swarm - no shame when money is involved. I want to speak to their parents, please.