Everything can be dangerous where there is money was told to me today by a famous Steemian. Why did I contact him? I was trying to help @dreamgirl12 with some great opportunities that were presenting in front of her, only to find that she was being scammed.
The predator choosing its prey
Today morning, around 07:43 GMT, @dreamgirl12 was approached by a Steemian claiming to give a 100% upvote worth $100 for the price of 7 SBD.
There was even a special offer of 5 upvotes on different posts for 2o SBD because it was his birthday that day!
This looks like a very attractive and tempting offer that would be difficult to refuse as there is so much to gain back.
Not having the money, @dreamgirl12 declined the proposition. Did anyone notice the "." after the name of gavvet? It is one of the hints that maybe it is a FAKE.
The predator enticing its prey
Being new to Steemit, many new authors like @dreamgirl12 do not know all the possible uses of the platform. There is so much business that is being developed around the Steemit blockchain that it is difficult to see all of them as scam.
The scammer is trying to get whatever he can from its prey and after checking her wallet, he asks for all the Steem that @dreamgirl12 currently have. She was able to see through the game and even declined this new proposition.
Is the prey able to escape?
The scammer again tried to get all the Steem of @dreamgirl2 but by then she has stopped responding. She got away winning this battle against the predator!
The aftermath
@dreamgirl12 immediately contacted me on Discord to tell me about this offer that she was getting and whether she was right in declining. So I tried to do some investigations to find if this was legit.
Maybe you will not understand the wordings as it is written in a local slang in Mauritius which consists of both English and French words mix.
After doing some analysis, I eventually contacted @gavvet about the service as there was something odd with the offer. @gavvet doesn't have a voting upvote worth that is $100!
In the conversation above, with the real @gavvet, there is no "." after his name. Luckily there was no harm that was done and I have heard other discord channels like M-A-P, run by @accelerator, who has been warning all of its members. But there is still a part left in this story.
The Shield
Feel like you are going to leave empty handed? I have prepared some steps that you can follow to ensure that you are not falling victim of a scam.
- Whenever you are getting such a mouth watering offer, first thing is to check the wallet history of the scammer. See if anyone has been sending money to the account for the purpose of upvoting their post. You will get an idea if this is a running service or this is a new one.
- Since it is a service that you send the url in the memo, you can copy the url and view the post. If the payout is quite significant as stated by the service, then you can be pretty confident that it is a legit service.
- As a last step, you can check the powerful SteemNow tool, which contains a calculator to find the exact voting power of the service. In this case for @dreamgirl12, I checked the upvote worth of @gavvet and also used the calculator to find his maximum upvote worth. As you can see, his current voting power is $50 and his maximum upvote worth is $64.51 which is only half of the amount the scammer pretending to be @gavvet was promising.
- The most important of all, whenever something seems too good to be true,then it surely is too good to be true and stay away from it!
Do you have a similar story? Is there any important advice that you would like to convey to all Steemians?
Share your conclusion with us so that the community is aware of it and can help in the security of the platform!
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