BEWARE the steemit.chat UPVOTE SCAM!!!
I am an extremely tolerant person and very rarely post regarding matters that don't make me feel good.
On this occasion however I am stunned by what I have just witnessed and feel obliged to warn the community immediately.
steemit.chat - The post promotion site
If you use Steemit.chat (which you should be!) it is normal practice to list the people you have upvoted, alerting them to your action. And the unspoken rule is that one at this stage politely upvotes the person back.
THE SCAM
Moments ago I received one such message in the #postpromotion feed from someone (let's call him User X), my name listed in a group of many and an indication that he had upvoted my last post there. And in my usual manner, I thanked User X for his vote and quickly returned the favour.
An hour later I receive a message from someone much more pro-active than myself who had taken the time to check up on User X.
He had checked every single post listed as having been upvoted by User X and found that in fact, User X had voted for NONE OF THEM!
I applaud the person who took the time to check each post associated with this list of names and I feel sadness for the person who uses this deceiving technique to get upvotes.
I have never downvoted a post before. Until now.
I am tempted to give the name of User X but will instead be watching him like a hawk. If he continues to use this trick to gain upvotes I will continue to flag him down.
That is the wonderful organic thing about Steemit... it can sense the poison in the body and it can push it out.
THE JOKE AT THE END!
Okay, this is kinda funny. I was just about to click post on this one when I had a moment of realisation.
User X had in his wisdom given himself a different username on steemit.chat to the username he has on steemit, so when checking to see if he had upvoted me, based on the username in front of me, it appeared as if he had not.
So... lesson learned. I have un-flagged his post and apologised for jumping to conclusions.
But please folks...
use the same username on all steemit associated platforms
and you will avoid confusing situations like this!
And perhaps if you feel so inclined, randomly check up on people claiming to have upvoted you using steemnow just to be sure everyone is being honest.
Steemit is a living breathing organism. And like I said, it has the power to eject the poison, downvoting you into oblivion.
I have seen it happen to many copy/paste spammers who refused to acknowledge their source.
So, treat people with respect and use the power of your downvote wisely.
I agree that it's a shady thing to do, but I don't think it's a scam. "User X" isn't stealing anything from anyone like an actual scam would. Having said that, it's crappy and that user deserves to be called out for it.
Yeah, worse than this he then messaged me to claim his innocence. So I checked on steemnow.com and saw that he placed his upvote after the complaint was made against him. So really he just dug his hole deeper. Though to be fair, he did upvote me at 100%
lol, I think this is some of the first #postpromotion drama :D
I was waiting for the dramatic ending too!
Does bring to mind the question of what-- if any-- the community take on reciprocal upvote/comment "rings" might be. I'm not talking about a few people in chat... I'm talking about the kind where it's almost an "industry" where someone literally "hires" 100's/1000's of people (usually through places like Fiverr and Amazon Mechanical Turk) to make accounts who will "upvote and comment" on command in return for something like 1/2c or even 1/10th cent over and over...
Hmmmm. A very interesting question you bring up here. No idea if there are any safeguards in place to protect against this.
Devs please take note!
Another takeaway is to quickly claim your username across all platforms, currently there is steemit.chat, telegram, Discord, and perhaps a few others where Steemians are quite active in. To avoid instances of "User X" squatting on your username and do anything as he pleases at the expense of tarnishing your reputation.
Be aware of any social platforms that has a steem community, and even if you are not active there, just sign up. It's your online name and brand afterall and its best not to let others rob its access from you.
Absolutely agreed. Get in there now before Steemit goes worldwide crazy big-time huge :)
Finished my mapping job just now. Had to put contour lines at 10m intervals. Used a program called QGIS.
Feeling pretty proud of myself after staying up late last night to figure it out! The client is turning up later. I am assuming the only way for me to deliver this to them is to have them download this program onto their own computers?
Which will require me having to teach them how to use the program!
It has been interesting leaning the many unexpected 'extras' for this kind of job. Next time it will be different.
And as I just mentioned in a previous post here... there is a danger of scraping STEEM passwords when the site is independent. This could be a catastrophe if a fake website shows up asking for them with STEEM in the domain and all the right graphics.
Some points which the design must be aware of. Or perhaps maybe the community can step in...
The headaches of decentralization.
Yes, Sam it is not good if someone not upvoted back for us. It is okay, if he or she missed our one or two our post to upvoted, but if never upvoted our post... that is ridicolous. :)
Agreed. I sometimes miss a few for sure. We have to sleep sometimes!!!
But this guy was being rude and had a scam running clearly.
After he contacted me to proclaim his innocence, I checked the exact timing of his vote on steemnow.com and it turns out that he placed his vote after the complaint was made! So I was right to flag him after all.
Before I wrote to you I had checked both his accounts and all the accounts he claimed to have upvoted to see if there were any upvotes going out and coming in because I did not want to come forward with a false accusation. :)
I foresaw that he would try to cover it up by upvoting later but the Blockchain never forgets. ;)
I have followed your account as you seem like the kind of person with intuition. Thank you for alerting me on steemit.chat to what was going on. I would never have seen this otherwise.
I have written to him three times to explain himself and he has failed to respond.
Says it all really. Sad.
From now on, I will have to check every time that people are being honest. Which is a shame, because Steemit is so bloody awesome. But growing fast, we are going to experience this kind of thing more and more.
Today I thought about setting up a bot that checks every upvote that is announced in the promotion chatroom but I don't know if it is such a widespread problem that it is worth my time. But if I see it again I will definitely set up the bot. :)
Great detective work. Thanks for the heads.
Thanks. It had to be said.
Glad to see everything seemed to work out. Hoepfully we don't see a lot of this confusion.
In fact... the plot thickened when I checked out the exact timing of his vote on steemnow.com and it turns out that he placed his vote after the complaint was made! So I was right to flag him after all.
Hopefully he will have learned his lesson. If we all just work as a team there will be no need for deception.
Absolutely. Teamwork... like a community that looks after the whole. I was alerted to this by someone I had never spoken to before. And yet he chose to help me :)
Love this.
(click bait) lol :p
I still enjoyed it!
Keep STEEM N ON,
Frank
In fact, the plot thickened when I checked out the exact timing of his vote on steemnow.com and it turns out that he placed his vote after the complaint was made! So I was right to flag him after all.
Ohhh...juicy...
:D
AWESOME post. Let me explain.
I signed up for the chat last week and immediately tried to contact the DEVS, so I joined #DEV to try to find one. I don't think it's monitored. SOMEONE NEEDS TO EXPLAIN TO NEW USERS THAT YOU SHOULD NOT USE YOUR STEEM PASSWORD on the chat site. It looks like you should. There needs to be a warning on the signup page. And the username differentiation is a fiasco, as your post just mentioned.
GOOD detective work. Now follow me and check out my LIVE Introduction post, shameless plug and all. LOL. But since I noticed this discrepancy and liked your post... it seems like a good plug. I still don't know who the DEVs are for the chatroom.
Thanks for this. Shameless plug follows in 1 .... 2.... 3....
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@uruiamme/the-world-s-most-dangerous-introduction-post-part-1
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@uruiamme/the-world-s-most-dangerous-introduction-post-part-2
Yes, many changes still to come I feel. The whole process will improve in time.
I checked your post. Great work.
This post has been ranked within the top 10 most undervalued posts in the first half of May 31. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $29.26 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: May 31 - Part I. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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thanks for letting me know :)