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"Hey I like your work, upvote me! it will mean a lot to me" or better still "I just followed and upvoted your work, upvote and follow me too"

Those familiar words rings through virtually every post on steemit. Like the popular saying goes, it rains on the good and on the bad.

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The infestation that needs eradication...the spam

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People used to write to get the proper audience to read, engage and bring their posts to life, now when we write, we patiently wait for the gate crashers to show.

Like a new born baby prone to infection if not properly handled, steemit, also a new born can also become corrupt and die if this infection is not nipped before it manifests.

So now when I read posts, I usually scroll down to the part where someone spams another person's post, have a good laugh, write the name down and continue investigating (Oh yes, I am investigating the source of this infestation and trying to find a solution).

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It is so bad that we now have a network within the categories of spammers present. We have the:

- Bots who simply comment and lure you to upvote and move on to the next

- Individuals with trails who say unrelated things and ask you to follow them, if you flag these set of people, they will come back and flag you using the power of a trail.

- Trolls who somehow manage to have a link to their post for any discussion you talk about.

- People who simply use images to cover for their inability to hold a decent conversation.

- People who never upvote but leave a long comment that baits you into upvoting.

- Those (not voting bots, but actually people) who announce the % they used in voting you instead of simply commenting something useful, and expect you to vote.

- Those who don't vote at all but claim to vote and expect you to vote their comments.

- Those who reply to all the comments received on your post without being asked (who sent them?) and they answer like they were the ones being referred to.

- Those who simply tell you to upvote their comment.

- Individuals who pretend to be voting bots.

- People who always respond with monosyllables like ok, nice, good etc

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These set of people or bots simply do not care if you insult them or not, they simply copy and paste and leave and hope that you upvote their posts.The sad thing is most of them are being run by steemians with a decent reputation score, who have been here not less than three to four months.

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The infestation that needs eradication...the scam

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A lot of people now are becoming weary of the ways at which hackers now breach people's accounts and do a lot of damage to the innocent victim before the person can even say Jack.

People now see a lot of fraudulent activities being propagated all in a bid for people to easily lose their SBD and steem and possibly their accounts.

One of the first things we learn as human beings on steemit is keeping our passwords confidential at all times, but being humans that we are , we often choose a convenient means of accessing the long, boring, secure and otherwise generated passwords being given to us.

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That drive for convenience, has always limited our security consciousness as it often times puts us in embarrassing situations.

A case I saw was about a guy who accidentally posted his password on the general page of steemit chat and I did not confirm how the story turned out. Imagine a scammer laying his hands on that, well we'll sing the bye bye money song.

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Another incident was about someone clicking on a link telling him his post was plagiarized, the comment was neither from cheetah nor from steemcleaners, it was not even from a recognized steemian, the person clicked and lost control of the account.

People go as far as impersonating reputable steemains on steemit chat in other to try and legitimize their scams.

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When Spam marries Scam

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Scam recently graduated on the platform and became a married entity when it got married to spam. Now the new way of promoting a scam is by spamming people's content, hoping for someone to fall prey to the nefarious plan and well sometimes they become successful.

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An example is the popular message "hey, click her to receive free 50 WCX bla bla bla, it is a new coin being launched bla bla bla" and these posts are always seen in comments of people with a link that has to be clicked to claim the reward.

What happens sometimes when you click such link is that, either you get logged out of steemit and discover someone used your account to feed his pocket or you lose total control.

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Losing SBD and steem is bearable compared to losing total control of your account you worked so hard to build as starting afresh is not usually fun.

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An oasis in the desert

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There is always a silver lining in every situation, an active troll database signifies the fact that the platform is getting noticed.

However certain steps can be taken to curb the resurfacing threat.

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Flags: Flags become a viable option to eradicate these people, however, doing so will require massive flagging, which in turn takes a toll on the voting power, individual flagging becomes an effective but stressful option.

Reporting: @steemcleaners, @sherlockholmes etc are examples of a few steemit members dedicated to eradicating threats, however it still falls back to flagging and the voting power issue.

Ignoring: Do not feed the trolls is a popular slang around here and it is for a good reason. The trolls feed off generosity given to their comments, if they are ignored as a principal step, they will eventually be forced to retire their methods.

Delegation: Delegating bots and individuals charged with the sole purpose of identifying and flagging spam becomes a viable option as more SP will require less percentage of flag and still be effective.

Public announcements: If those in the higher echelon of powers around here make some noise about it, it will rattle some cages in the den of the spammers and scammers which in turn provides room for them to commit errors and get caught

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Images were taken from pixabay, shutterstock and scam detector

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Thanks to @elyaque for the badge and @son-of-satire for the generic footer

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