Because Steemit Chat Is Vulnerable To Scammers

I haven’t came across any data for what percentage of Steemit users regularly use Steemit Chat feature to interact with one another. But I know many of them have never registered for this service. The sole reason for the ones who have registered here is that this service is officially linked from the Steemit website. But the question remains, what is so official about it?

1. The service is not integrated into the main website.

For using the chat feature, one has to go to a different website, leaving behind the main blog where a blogger needs to be active.

2. The service is not the part of the blockchain.

Many users are under the false impression that as this service is the official chat feature of Steemit, it’s also running on the blockchain infrastructure but it’s not true. Steemit Chat is not on the blockchain.

3. Compared to other platforms like Discord App, Steemit Chat is very slow and lack many features.

The ease of use, speed and several other versatile features of the multi-platform software Discord is rapidly gaining up popularity among Steemians. Several sub groups of Steemit community are already running their own independent servers and channels over Discord. Many developers have already built numerous bots to facilitate the needs of Steemians there. Hence many of the Steemit Chat users are abandoning that platform for Discord today.

4. Scamsters galore on Steemit Chat.

The biggest and most dangerous problem of Steemit Chat is the presence of increasing number of scammers there, who aim to deceive money from inexperienced newbies on Steemit platform. The prime reason for this is the "official" label of Steemit Chat. Since Steemit Chat is not integrated with Steem blockchain, it is an independent chat platform linked to the official Steemit website. Hence it requires you to create a fresh login ID and password to use this service. Since people come to this service to connect exclusively with steemians only, they generally create the same ID as on Steem blockchain. And after using it for some period, they tend to forget this important distinction. This vulnerability is encashed by fraudsters.

Since not every Steemian is using Steemit Chat and not all who are using have got the identical ID here as on Steemit, the con artists create an identical ID of a reputed whale account and start misrepresenting them here. Noobs are mostly caught unawares. They get carried away with the temptation of interaction with a big whale and trust every word of theirs. Many times they part with their hard earned money in exchange of a big upvote from them. At times, they even give their Steemit account’s Active Key which the scammer convinces them to give it on some pretext and then steal whole of their wallet.

My Recent Encounter With Scammers On Steemit Chat:

In the past week itself, I was approached by couple of such scammers. One was the account with the user name @jamesc – the top 11th ranked account on Steemit on the basis of Steem Power. This fellow asked me to transfer him 15 SBD for a $130 upvote. Quite ridiculous but I agreed to look what comes next.

Next he asked me to transfer the amount to his Bittrex account:

When I told him I don’t have $15 liquidity in my wallet, he checked up my wallet and surprisingly told me that you can send me whatever is available right now. And when I said I’d transfer it to your Steemit wallet only, he blocked me up!

This kind of conversation immediately rings the alarm bells but sometimes greed is blinding and it takes over our good sense. During this conversation, I contacted @teamsteem about the genuinity of this account. He was generous enough to immediately confirm me that this one is a scammer.

A few days later, I was approached by another scammer with the account @val-a – a top 7 ranked account with respect to Steem Power. Now this was offering $200 upvote for merely transferring $12.

But this conversation was very ridiculous. The said Steemit account had already delegated all his SP to someone and didn’t had any vote strength. And the scammer didn’t want to understand that. Perhaps he got it later on, so he too blocked me after sometime on. 😊

I've heard of several more incidents like being approached by @steemit2 account (23rd most valued account on Steemit) and people offering to delegate hundreds of thousands of SP in return of your Active Account Keys (which they say is necessary to delegate SP quickly), etc.

The most important precaution is not to trust anyone with your Active Account Keys. Even in the exceptional scenario of most trusted case, if you have to briefly handover your active keys to someone, do transfer all your liquid SBDs & Steem into your savings before doing so. And then immediately change the Key after recovering it.

5. All first time chat messages are looked down as potential scammer or spammer.

Because of such rampant presence of scammers, I became over-cautious of all new messages from people who are contacting me for the first time here. I tend to ignore them and give them the least priority. Sometimes my attitude is not very friendly while chatting with them.

Overall, I feel this Steemit Chat platform is not friendlier, easy to use, and not very well developed. It is a breeding ground for scammers who are exploiting vulnerable Steemians and giving a bad name to whole Steemit community. Such a platform should be discontinued. Even if it needs to be continued, it should run independent of Steemit without any affiliation to the official Steemit website.

The way Busy has integrated the chat platform in its blog on Steem should be the way forward.
I hope you got my point here. I'd love to hear your views and experiences on Steemit Chat. Are you satisfied with this tool?

Do leave your feedback, reactions and criticism in the comments below. I love positive interactions with you. If you just upvote my post, I do feel happy. But I'd be happier if you leave a comment too.

I sometimes send a small gift of 101 cents to 999 cents to one of the comments here depending upon my mood and account liquidity level. Hope you won't mind a small tip if sending that makes me happy.

If you are on Telegram, you may want to interact with my bot Veganizer or the Hindi version गौमाता कामधेनु. Do subscribe my Telegram Supergroup for chat related to veganism. Thank you for reading! 💓