Beware Of The Catfish Scammers! Or Don't Trust Photo Verification -...

Due to the observed popularity of young women posting travel blogs, there have been a wave of catfishes faking photo verification on photo editor software.

Edit: Hive account@jennamarbles has proven her identity well enough that I believe her to be legitimate: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@positive/jennamarbles-has-provided-verification-introduceyourself

Edit 2: @Halo has now also proven her identity beyond all reasonable doubt:
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@positive/catfishes-exposed-halo-catfishes-are-getting-sloppy-introduceyourself

The fact that it's so easy to successfully catfish will attract scammers across the net who will essentially see an opportunity to conduct their business legally.

This will not encourage unique, authentic content, but will encourage deception and borderline fraud.

And may indeed create a ripe ground for identity theft as scammers pull images from the social media site of women who haven't authorised them do so, to produce cash-attracting Steem blogs.

How to solve this?

There'll soon be a cryptographic solution see Hive account@imp3's post: https://steemit.com/steemit/@imp3/howto-verify-yourself-and-other-properly-with-keybase

One simple approach is to not upvote personal posts centered on photo verification alone.

Instead, upvote such posts based on spoken video verification.

While this does not guarantee that the blog writer is the person in the video, it at least sieves out identity theft, and makes deception more expensive.

Particularly so, if video verification is required per day.

While it may make little economic sense to spend time formally verifying whether or not images have been tampered with, there is an online tool which enables you to judge whether or not an image is likely to have been modified (it also provides some information on the image's metadata): http://imageedited.com/

So you may run the image through the online software, and query the blog poster if you suspect the poster is engaged in fraud.

Then with greater proof you may flag the scammer to discourage his behaviour.

There'll soon be a cryptographic solution see Hive account@imp3's post: https://steemit.com/steemit/@imp3/howto-verify-yourself-and-other-properly-with-keybase

Let's discourage deception and encourage high quality, unique posts!

That is what will make encourage mass adoption of Steemit.

Another Catfish Exposed Hive account@halo, More to Come (unfortunately):

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@positive/catfishes-exposed-halo-catfishes-are-getting-sloppy-introduceyourself

Check out my other posts:

Beware Of The Catfish Scammers! Or Don't Trust Photo Verification - With Solutions. #introduceyourself

How to solve this?

Let's discourage deception and encourage high quality, unique posts!

That is what will make encourage mass adoption of Steemit.

Another Catfish Exposed Hive account@halo, More to Come (unfortunately):

Check out my other posts:

Why you shouldn't criticize liquidity whales

Don't panic sell you'll regret it

Steem needs to invest in a better subreddit

The reflections of a professional Steemer in 2031