Lesson learned... This is a Public Service Announcement... Be Aware of Scammers in Steemit.Chat Impersonating Whales!

Dear Steemit Friends,

I wanted to create a post as a public service notice to help warn the community of a new scam that is starting to impact users of Steemit. It's not a complex scam and in hindsight should have easily been detected. I myself was recently victim to it (stupid on my part) and several others that I recently found out when I brought it up in common chat.

I was up late last night working on some of my various Steemit and Discord projects when I was I was DMed in Steemit.Chat by this user. Because this user that messaged me on Steemit.Chat was using the handle of a very SP wealthy whale, I will not disclose his name. The catch here is that the user in Steemit Chat is in fact not the real Whale from Steemit. This person was impersonating him.

The Steemit.Chat user DMed me and after a few minutes of conversation asked me to send him 10 SBD to upvote a few of my posts. It seemed a little strange to me, but I figured why not. I admit, when I looked his account up on Steemit and saw the more then half a million SP, I saw dollar signs in my eyes. He had good references in several posts about him and seemed like he was actively upvoting posts.

What I did not catch was that he asked me to send the funds to poloniex using the memo 268db175fa78a5da. This should have already been a red flag, but because I was distracted by some other work, watching a movie, it being late, and a myriad of other excuses including the potential to gain a pretty substantial uplift on a few of my posts, I figured 10 SBD was not much to lose to "test" it out.

Of course it turned out to be a scam and from my understanding, I'm not the first. 10 SBD is not much to me to lose, but to others, it is a lot of money. For this reason, I wanted to warn people, especially those who are new and to those people who cannot afford to lose 10 SBD and are more likely to succumb to these scams because of the potential to earn more.

There are several Steemit.Chat and Discord users who are passing themselves off as their legitimate Steemit Whale counterparts to take advantage of people. Unfortunately because Steemit deals with virtual currency with real world value, we as users have to deal with these low life scammers who find the need to prey on people who are legitimately working hard on this platform.

Please make sure you are only sending your funds to the actual account holders through Steem and not through a third party exchange. Because there are other similar scams going on , please also be sure to check the spelling of the handle of the name you are sending your funds to. For me it's a lesson learned and something I want to share with others out there.

Thanks for reading!