Be careful when you type or you will lose your money!

I was going to write this post as a entry for the competition about scammers that @swissclive is making but I thought better and I concluded that the type of scamming that I am going to describe here does not fit so well the model that @swissclive provided. Find the lady is a much better example of classic scammers than what I will show you in this post, which is a kind of phishing if I am not wrong, but I find it important to make people aware of it.

A few months ago, when I was much more novice to Steem(it) and how these things work, I have written posts, interacted with people and I was collecting a few Steem and SBD in my wallet. It was so hard for me to make these money since I had no support from anybody, I had no followers so the only place where my posts were featured was the new section. To keep this simple, it was simply hard for me to make my first coins here.

One day I decided that I want to change some SBD for Steem, only to see how it works and the single way to convert them that I knew back then, it was through @blocktrades

I am sure that everybody used their exchange to convert coins at least once. I am also sure that very few of the people using @blocktrades have made the same mistake as I did. Instead of reading it well BLOCKTRADES, I don't know why, at the beginning I have read it BLOCKTRADERS. And I was aware that it is very recommended to copy/paste the addresses where you want to send money, but I was sure that I am sending the money where I should send them, because it was just one simple word, how hard would it be to mistype it? I double checked if I typed it correctly and I have typed it correctly, blocktradeRs, because this is how mistakenly I have read it...

I still remember that I was refreshing my wallet to see if I finally received the money from @blocktrades that I was expecting and I was asking myself:

How much time does it takes for a transaction like this to complete, I thought Steem was fast, why I didn't got my money yet?

I then checked my transaction again and then I realized how fool I was.

I was not scammed, I scammed myself!

Here is the @blocktrades wallet, you can see my transaction there:

I know that for many of you, one SBD dosen't mean that much, even for me right now, a single SBD doesn't mean so much, but at that time, it was taking me a whole week to make one SBD from the rewards on my posts on which I was working a lot. I was very sad with my loss and tried to write to that account. I have tried to write to that account with the hope that he will send my money back, do you see, so fool I was!

It is easy to see that right after he received the money from me, he cashed them out, completely ignoring my comment.

Do you think I was a fool? Let me tell you in the John Lennon style that:

I was not the only one!

@blocktraders received a lot of money from unlucky people:

And from the transactions that this account makes, it seems to have more accounts including

• @blocktraded
• @bittrek
• @steels.steem

If you go to @blocktraded you can see the sad transactions of @marrada who sent them 73 Steem. This is a small fortune for many people. He then tried to talk to these guys sending two transactions:

Hello, I accidently sent you my steem instead of "blocktrade". Can you send it back to me? Please. You can keep a few for the trouble. :)

so i see you decided to keep my money that i sent to you on accident, are you sure you want to do this?

Both of these transactions messages were successfully ignored, but @blocktrades (who would have thought this) has flagged their last posts. Checking their most recent post I have seen another guy writing desperately in the comment section:

I am sorry to read this, I know how that guy feels, I once were in the same situation and it was a lesson learned for me, since then I have been checking the addresses multiple times in order to make sure that everything is okay.

I have finished to describe this Steem phishing and I may be making another post for actual scammers, but at the moment I don't remember so well the scams that I went through in this life, but until then I hope that all of you have learned from my experience and you will be paying attention to the addresses you are sending money to. Better safe than sorry :D

Thanks a lot for reading!