Why its important to verify yourself as a newcomer

Hey everyone!

For a long time while curating the #introduceyourself tag I've tried to tell users that it would be appreciated if they would verify being the person they claim to be. Not only because there are a lot of plagiarists and ID thefts occurring because of the monetary rewards that go towards intro posts, but also because we as curators would feel a lot safer knowing we are rewarding actual unique people. The worst case scenario about this in my mind for long was that someone would start out pretending to be someone else and use their ID to get a lot of rewards from the platform. This turned out to have happened yesterday.

I remember this one user in particular coming onto steemit.chat and DM'ing me and a few other high influential users her introduction post. It seemed odd that she knew who to contact on her first post but I brushed it off as I figured her friends would've explained to her. She made some rewards and got picked up by other users either through messages or autovotes later on. After a while my suspicions became bigger and bigger combined with the time some of her group got put on the cheetah list for sending transactions to the same Bittrex memo so I decided to stop rewarding her posts until things got more clear about their situation. Now I am glad that I did that cause this is what occurred yesterday.

I was browsing #introduceyourself and noticed a new poster with a familiar face, I quickly checked my DM's on steemit.chat trying to remember her username and got to her steem account and commented this:

I was not surprised to hear that that user had been fake, or in this case controlled by another person. Even more so when I remembered she specifically made a verification video proving she was the owner of the account. So I replied with this:

Now if we were to believe her, it seems as if she has been contacted by that fake Steem user and asked to do a verification video. Why she accepted to do such a thing and if there was money involved is not something I am aware of, but this is why you should be careful with how your content or your ID is used online. If it sounds too good to be true to just make a photo or video of yourself "verifying" your identity to someone else for some rewards, it often means that someone else is gaining more from it.

Now we are left with an ID thief who has made a lot of Steem and powered it all down and the real user coming to the platform trying to start fresh but having a lot of shady history and not many readers that will believe her for future posts. What if this user is fake as well? What if her way to prove it is just another middlemen transaction being paid for in advance so the ID thief can keep on pretending to be someone else?

This is a pretty unique case but I just wanted to highlight why its important to verify yourself as a newcomer. Verifying yourself doesn't mean you have to show your real identity, doing it through other social platforms where you have spent a lot of time and activity can work as well. I for instance proved my identity through my active Reddit account.

Anyway, I know it often seems a bit too much to ask a newcomer to verify themselves, but I encourage you to ask anyway in the future just to avoid these ID thefts and let the newcomers know that if they do verify themselves it often means that the readers and curators feel a lot more safe placing their votes on their intro posts. Most of the people won't mind verifying and will understand where you are coming from.

Thanks for reading.

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