@kateadventure: More than Plagiarism…Identity Theft

@kateadventure has stolen the identity of a travel blogger who goes by the name Kate Adventurous (Kate McCulley). Most of the posts from kateadventure are taken directly from Kate’s blog in their entirety, with a few posts plagiarized from other sources. 

We’ve seen lots of plagiarism going on here on SteemIt, but this one goes beyond plagiarism to identity theft. (And I’m sure there are more examples of posters stealing identities. This is just one.) The person going by the name kateadventure has not only plagiarized the works of the real Kate, but has pretended to be her.  

According to wikipedia, "Identity theft is the deliberate use of someone else’s identity, usually as a method to gain a financial advantage or obtain credit and other benefits in the other person's name, and perhaps to the other person's disadvantage or loss.” At the time of this post, kateadventure’s wallet shows an estimated value of $592.03, and he/she has cashed out 127.778SBD and 1 Steem. 

To make the theft more convincing, kateadventure started posting links at the bottom of each plagiarized post to the real Kate’s blog, Facebook page, and Twitter page.  

But when people commented on the posts, kateadventure’s replies were sketchy. The English in the replies was terrible, despite the good writing in the blogposts. And some of the replies just didn’t make any sense at all. And the replies repeatedly called people “mate,” despite the real Kate being from Boston. Hmm…. 

Kateadventure has failed to provide identification verification, despite several requests. So I posted on the real Kate’s Facebook page to find out if she was really re-posting her stuff on SteemIt. I’m awaiting her response for final confirmation, but it seems pretty obvious at this point. At least to me. I will let you know if/when I hear back from her.

I read a post this morning from kateadventure. Came back to it and found that the Cheetah bot had commented on the post. Kateadventure then deleted the post and replaced the title and body with “bot say plagiarism.” But…..an hour later, kateadventure posted yet another blogpost taken directly from the real Kate’s blog….and people are upvoting it despite a comment from the Cheetah bot, @adol pointing out the high possibility of fraud, and many downvotes/flags. 

This just makes me mad. Ugh. 

Corinne Stokes