Stopping Wallet Scam Messages

Yesterday it looked like there was another wallet phishing/scam attempt on steemit users by the account @steemitsecurity.

These attacks flourish and will not stop because it costs a very small amount to the scammer and the potential returns are quite large.

It only takes a small number of people to believe the message and the scammers have made money by draining the liquid rewards from their account.

It could be worse, they might get a hold of the owner key or compromise the account in some other way. They could set up an autovote bot to upvote spam. A number of things, all of which hurt the platform and can affect the perception that people have, old and new to steemit.

What can be done?

I have a potential answer.

Why not up the minimum transfer amount to 10 cents. That way if they want to message hundreds of people it will cost them real money. It might not seem like much but it is often little steps like these that can make a difference.

Some might think that keeping things the way they are is best because we can use this to instant message people.

However that is rarely what wallet transfers are being used for. We have chat, we have instant messages on busy.org. We don't need messages via the wallet.

How many spam wallet messages have you had?

Now compare that to the number of genuine messages you have received in your wallet.

Quite a difference huh?

So Steemit, can we do something rather than nothing? By doing something at least we have taken some steps.