Clearly a verified user.

You may remember in my last post here, I had a brief message on how our community has the potential to degrade if we do not do something to stop the rampant abuse. I mentioned only briefly the case of identity theft, and how this could become a huge issue in our future. Well.

Identity Theft is Already Rampant.

This afternoon I was improving Hive account@cheetah. I generally monitor my bot, in hopes to find authors (before they get pissed at me). I noticed one post just barely slip under my detection, so I thought I would manually check, and sure enough, a large portion was plagiarized. But that's not all.
Here is the post.
When I see repeat offenders, I generally check the post history. And look at that, it seems the introductory post was also identity theft.
Just another average day in steemit for me -- but that didn't stop my investigation, and I am glad I didn't. I searched the bittrex memo 71867115fc444f2bb8c, and come across a familiar face.

Hive account@kateadventure. You may remember this this post here, wherein Hive account@corinnestokes followed up on cheetah bot's catch, noting the account to be fake. But that isn't the only account using that memo. I also found Hive account@juanitalee as well. This person has taken over $2,000 from our community. And both Hive account@dantheman and Hive account@ned upvoted the identity theft.

That makes three, making this possibly our first serial identity thief.

EDIT: it looks like there is a fourth too.

Now when I see a post like this, where the user belays verifying, I am scared. Scared because it is now acceptable to welcome people to our community with hundreds of dollars, and this is getting continuously abused with fake accounts.

Here two more identity theft cases I have caught:
In case you don't believe me.
There are plenty more.

That is 5 examples of identity theft in this post that I can pull out of my hat before I even look through the cheetah log. This is a huge problem.

We need a proper verification channel, and we need to start being careful. Developers take note, and community take note. This is getting serious.

Since this is also highly illegal, I encourage bittrex and poloniex to follow up on this.

Here's the bittrex memo:
71867115fc444f2bb8c
And their poloniex memo:
4aaad7172fa0a3e8

#doyourpart