Dear Steemers,
A new scam is making the rounds. It is important that you know this. And it is important that you protect your account from it.
So if you are receiving a private message from anyone delegating Steem Power to your account, avoid at all costs. You will also be asked to enter your password or wallet key into a form.
It's a fake form designed to steal your account.
Never. Fill. It.
And if you do? You lose your Steemit account. Your funds. And your sleep.
This Is A Clever Scam
Because our scammer, blinded by greed, is impersonating someone. In my case, the scammer signed up with the username of a whale.
He used @michael-b as his username. And Michael is powerful.
But Michael is not on Steemit.chat or Discord, opening the doors to scam wide open.
Then, after signing up on Steemit Chat, he sent me a message to delegate a portion of his Steem Power to my account. He knows I am Indian. Perhaps he saw my profile.
At this point, in between conversation, I was trying to verify if he is the real Michael. Because, quite honestly, I couldn't ask him.
Then he drops that link.
And that link points to a website with a form:
No one has delegated me Steem Power before. So I didn't know if this form was real or fake. Yet something surely didn't seem right.
So I messaged @rahul.stan and @acidyo to double-check. And Acidyo quickly replies:
So when I knew anyone can delegate power through Busy / client, I decided to message Michael back... only to find him gone.
I couldn't message him anymore. And I thought he blocked me.
Then comes another account.
And this one is skillfully named delegate-support.
Delegate-support was waiting for me to fill those details. He says he didn't block me. He, in fact, deleted his account. All this already screamed scam to me.
Yet I played along.
It looked like he is very close to Ned (CEO of Steemit). 😂
Then he deleted his account again.
When, in reality, it was @Pfunk who did it.
Acidyo messaged him these accounts and Pfunk immediately disabled them.
I wasn't the only target. In fact, our scammer messaged a bunch of us. I took the lead to inform them.
For now, he has been silenced. Not forever. Maybe there are a bunch of them out there. And these bunch are pulling such dirty tricks on other good users.
So it's important to educate and inform everyone. Your Steemit account is important to you. And I request everyone of you to be extra-careful when it comes to sharing your password or wallet keys with anyone.
Or any website.
Cheers,
Sid
UPDATE:
Account @michael-b belongs to Steemit Inc developer Michael. He wasn't the one messaging us. Thanks to @Donkeypong for investigating this.
