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RE: HOW TO DOX A SCAMMER USING OSINT | The Zeartul Example
I'm a privacy advocate. Doxxing is not cool, especially on a blockchain where information is permanently registered. Giving you a little downvote, because I don't think such practices will solve any problems.
On a platform that thrives on transparency. 😉
"Doxxing" I consider a mean and spiteful action.... Sometimes though it's simple justice.... Fraud and theft, simply exposing a criminal.
It thrives on transparency about the transactions and blockchain operations, not people's private information. If you want privacy violations, make a stop at Facebook
Actually none of that information was private.
True, this was all information that he self published for public consumption. It's right in the title of the post "open source".
But steemit is not really private. If you want a private Social network there are some sites on tor for that.
[-]drakos, are you kidding me? if someone took all your steem and money. you would do the same to find out who did it.
Yes I would do my own research to find out who he is, but I wouldn't dox him publicly. I mean now that his identity is known, what's next? Send someone to his address to punch him in the face? Is anyone taking any measures to visit or sue him?
yeah nothing can stop that. but i think people get doxxed for a reason. i cant see someone putting up innocent peoples info and then someone go do something to them
yeah, like that one time some kid got doxxed as the Boston bomber, even though he wasn't and turned out he actually was missing and dead. totally didn't traumatize his family.
What a naive statement!
Would you share the information you collected with the other people he defrauded? How?
A great many people were defrauded by @zeartul, and I don't think @fortified has an obligation to @zeartul to conceal his identity while helping those people get their money back, or at least to know who took it.
To hold back that information from folks that you know were defrauded could be considered a crime itself: misprision of a felony.
Given this is a criminal matter on a decentralized blockchain where the community is supposed to resolve issues without centralized powers, this is the only solution.
This isn't doxxing. It's solving a crime. Do acknowledge the difference, because he owes people on Steemit money he deliberately stole, and counted on not being named to get away with the crime.
In this case, revealing his name is necessary to enable his crimes to be compensated by him.
Some day, he may decide he wants to be morally upright, and being able to compensate those he's stolen from might become important to him. Since this may be the only way those people can make their availability for refunds known to him, he might actually be grateful for that opportunity, should he become a morally upright person.
If not, they have a right to know who he is so they can get their money back.
tl;dr this isn't doxxing. It's justice.
so you're advocating vigilantism. great. The truth is people invested money in a dubious scam and should've done their research, it's their fault and they should own up to it, not become fucking crybabies. The blockchain wasn't made for that kind of people. Code. Is. Law.
I am totally advocating decentralized operations on Steemit, including resolving tort actions. If you call that vigilantism, then you so define all decentralized operations to resolve such criminal matters.
Code is fact. Code is fungible. Code is broken, and flawed, and needs to be fixed all too often. It is not the equivalent of 'Thou shall not kill'. Don't steal isn't something that can be embedded in code.
Therefore redressing grievances is something that needs to happen, since code can't prevent it.
I am not hearing people crying over their lost SBD's. I do consider buying votes a morally hazardous practice, so I don't do it. That doesn't mean that people who are suckered into scams shouldn't be able to redress their greivances. It means I didn't lose any damn money when @zeartul cleaned out @bellyrub and bailed the platform.
Are you claiming that every votebot on the platform is a scam? If so, the community should remove them from the platform, just like every other scammer, spammer, and plagiarist. I don't think votebots are criminal by default, and given that folks like @aggroed and @berniesanders run votebots, I think there is damn good reason to say that votebots aren't dubious scams. Neither of them has scammed anyone, and equating votebots with scams is slanderous.
Votebots are unsafe presently, because there are no mechanisms that have evolved - due to instances like this, that create perception of the need for them - to secure peoples investments in buying votes.
Regardless, decentralized tort resolution is necessary on decentralized platforms that involve fiduciary matters, and spewing ad hominems like 'vigilantism' isn't useful.
As much as you revile crybabies, I detest thieves and psychopaths incapable of empathy.
Make of that what you will.
no, I call doxxing vigilantism. You advocate doxxing, thus you advocate vigilantism. Keep living in your own delusion by trying to banalise this extremely dangerous point of view.
When someone will falsely get accused of scamming , and then get doxxed before people realise the accusation was false, maybe you will understand why this is completely fucked up.
The people that'll lose money to scams will always be idiots who saw a big potential roi and went for it. People that can get their lives destroyed by doxxing, however, may be completely innocent and just happen to be falsely accused.
Despite my best effort to see things from your point of view, and I can certainly empathize regarding innocent victims of doxxing, I just can't see how you can have any realistic expectation that people who have been defrauded should be unable to pursue recompense.
You completely fail to elucidate a realistic alternative, which is just encouraging the current protocol. Your only criticism of the current protocol is that mistakes can happen.
Name any mechanism, in any social institution, in which mistakes can't happen, and be bad.
If you expect people that have been defrauded to do nothing to recover their money, your opinion is so divorced from reality it is meaningless. Propose a reasonable, functional alternative, point to clues to such, or be ignored as irrelevant.
Because expecting people to do nothing is irrelevant. It's not even remotely reasonable.
have you read the bitcoin white paper? Or at least the abstract? that is exactly what I'm advocating. Decentralization comes at a price. No one forces you to spend money on bots. no one.
I exemplify that truth. I have never used a bot intentionally. I intend never to do so, at least not for votes.
Yet, I recognize that they infest Steemit. People use them for reasons, the median payout on Steemit is $.01, and this drives people to seek upvotes from bots.
This drives profits into the coffers of SP delegators, and is a net negative to the platform - and Steem - but that doesn't relieve scammers like @zeartul of his personal responsibility for their frauds.
People have a right to seek redress, and they will do so, regardless of our opinions. It's gonna happen.
It's not wrong, either.