Impersonation commited on Steemit

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There is a problem on Steemit, not just of plagiarism, but now of cyber impersonation crime. Yesterday I was scrolling through Steemit, and I saw a post about a young girl who had just been admitted into the hospital after a brain injury. The girl’s aunt (aka @belle.julz ) was posting the story about her niece asking for upvotes and resteems for help. The aunt told everyone that the father had left the mother and family and the mother had recently died, so this aunt was taking care of her little niece. Really sad story right? Problem was, the poster wasn’t the aunt, and the mother was still alive, it was a lie.

It wasn’t that I had a sharper eye than anyone else, but that by a chance of luck I had seen this story posted by the mother on Facebook earlier that day. So when I saw this post by the “aunt” on Steemit, and that @belle.julz said the mother was dead, something didn’t feel right. I couldn’t remember where I saw the story on Facebook, so I searched Google and eventually found the mother’s original post had been picked up by the news and had gone viral with over 200k shares. I went back to the “aunt’s”( @belle.julz ) Steemit post and asked if she was sure she was the aunt, and the “aunt” said the mother in the photo was the HER mother not the girl’s mother and acted upset.

After how she reacted I felt guilty for questioning her, like I did a bad thing, but part of me felt something was wrong. I kept thinking about the post, and I sent a Facebook message to the mom who had posted the original story about her daughter’s accident, asking her if she knew this lady claiming to be her daughter’s aunt. The mom responded saying she had no idea who this lady was and was very angry that some stranger was using her daughter’s name to beg for money. The mother was so stressed out when she saw this post that she couldn’t sleep, so I told her I would help get it taken down.

Now there was proof that this fake “aunt” was completely lying to everyone by: impersonating an aunt, defaming a father for abandoning his family, and lying about the mother’s death. I went back to the original post on Steemit from the “aunt” ( @belle.julz ) and told the “aunt” I had found and talked to the real mother on Facebook, and had proof that she was lying. I told @belle.julz to apologize to the mother and remove the post, and that I was going to be reporting her to @steemcleaners.

To her credit @belle.julz did remove the post and apologized. After the apology was up, I messaged the mother again and let her know the article was down and the imposter had said they’re sorry. The mother was relieved and warned people on her Facebook post about people trying to impersonate her. So, the scammer was caught this time, and all seemed to end well.

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However, I think this whole situation is a good example of a growing problem I’ve been seeing on Steemit. As more and more people are hearing about this platform where you can get real money for upvotes, there will be more scammers trying to post anything they think can generate profit regardless of morals. In this case impersonating and lying about a family is a massive step up from just copy and paste plagiarism. If this was done in Canada, under section 404 of the criminal code impersonating someone is a crime punishable up to 10 years in prison. @belle.julz is posting from the Philippines, and The Cybercrime Prevention act of the Philippines of 2012 doesn’t explicitly say you can’t pose as someone else online, however a case on page 7 under “Computer-related Identity Theft” might be argued? I’m not a Filipino lawyer, so I won’t pretend to know, but to me this doesn’t seem right, and might be arguable in court?

Legal stuff aside, what are we as a community going to do to stop this behavior? First of all, we can all be a little more careful what we upvote, but as the scammers get better and better this might be hard to keep up with. If a story like this went viral outside Steemit, imagine the damage it would do to our community and what other people think of Steemit. Their impression of Steemit might be: “That scammy social media website where criminal activity is happening.”

To me, Steemit is too special to let that happen to. I don’t want to see us get overrun by scammers and I’m thinking neither do our community leaders like: @jerrybanfield , @kingscrown , @papa-pepper, @ned and neither do you. We need to acknowledge and deal with this issue before it becomes worse and hurts the brand of Steem. (PS, I really hope these whales don’t mind me tagging them.)

Any Ideas?

I talked about this issue with my husband @sevenstars and he had some ideas on this:

His thoughts are that if we’re going to let people create multiple accounts, then every account should have to be backed by a unique ID. For example: let’s say Bob creates his first steemit account, then Bob needs to prove his identity somehow (Maybe a passport? Or whatever we decide to accept). Once Bob’s identity is proved, Bob gets a unique Public/Private ID number (maybe stored on blockchain?). Then, if Bob makes a new Steemit account, he must register with his existing private ID number. If he tries to create a new account with a new ID number Bob won’t have the supporting documents necessary to validate a new ID unless he’s James Bond and has multiple identities.

Extrapolating out, let’s say that each and every Steemit account needs to be registered to a single ID number, both publicly visible (so people can see that Bob’s public ID number of 8xb2C-NlQd4-b1C6vG owns all 3 accounts’ of X, Y, and Z), and privately signed (for internal verification). I think this system gives people a good balance of privacy (the public wouldn’t know their public identity), yet also incentivizes them that if they misuse their Steemit account(s), they can be banned instead of allowing them to create a new account with a new email address and learning how to scam better on the next iteration.

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Either way, this whole thing makes me so angry. This little girl and her family have been taken advantage by a scammer on Steemit. Let’s not let this opportunity to improve the platform slip through our fingers.

“I believe @ned has said before that he created steemit partly as a way to give to charities who are in need? Maybe I'm wrong, as I'm not 100% sure what his position is, but I imagine if @ned saw what happened here he would be disgusted.
I still think Steemit as a platform is amazing, but this gross misuse of the platform proves that we haven't taken the appropriate measures to disincentivize this behaviour. As more people are learning about steemit, we inevitably have more cheaters and liars starting to join as well. Perhaps forcing people only have accounts approved with some sort of ID so that if they're found misbehaving, all accounts tied to that ID can have action taken against them? I'm not sure, but this is clearly a problem that needs to be fixed before Steemit truly goes primetime.”
@sevenstars

Final question: Using this Public/Private ID system, do we think people would be more or less incentivized to act in an honorable manner? Obviously, I’m thinking people would be more honorable, but what do you think?

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Thank you for reading!