For several months, I actively fight scams and phishing attempts on Steemit. Up to now, I published no less than 39 different posts to inform you about scam or phishing attempts.
I bet you have also received one notification of my Warning-Bot to inform you of a scam attempt found in one the replies of your posts.
A human work
Even if I use a bot to send warnings to users, there is still a lot of work done manually: detecting new scams and phishing, analyzing the threats they represent, the tracking the notifications and possible errors ... all this is harassing ....
But this human work is paying off:
If you look at
, the scam warning bot created by
, it sent "only" 4465 warnings. In comparison, I sent out nearly 41000 notifications.
I’m proud to say I was able to inform and protect 10 times more users. The only drawback is that I often found myself unable to interact with you because my bot was busy sending warnings.Scam and phishing attempts are slowing down.
This graphic shows the number of warnings I sent last 5 months. As you can see, April has been the month of all records. But if you now look at May, we are below the 50% of previous period. Looks like scammers start discouraging.
A collective work
Needles to say I would have been able to achieve such work all alone.
This scam fight is a collective work done with the team (
, @ fubar-bdhr,
,
,
,
,
), but also with other people who have joined this initiative and are working behind the scenes to protect the platform and its users:
,
, …
Many of you have also regularly informed me of the new scam you are discovering. It is truly a precious help!
A big shout out to all of you for the amazing work you do every day!
Will the scam/phishing war be over soon?
I doubt it, because this is a lucrative job for scammers.
Anyway, the community has shown that it is able to defend itself. Our protection bots are getting smarter and the scams are being detected more and more quickly. Our educational work has also paid off, and users are now better informed and more careful not to be fooled.
Although I stay on alert, I am delighted to see a decrease in scams. For me, this means that I will finally be able to devote more time to my others projects (SteemSQL, SteemitBoard, …)
An incredible support
I received hundreds, even thousands, of replies and thanks following my warnings. People have been really grateful when I they contacted on chat for help.
I’m so sorry that I have not been able to answer you all.
Be sure your support and encouragement have been invaluable to me to continue this ungrateful work. Whenever I was about to give up, I received a new comment with kind words and found myself ready to continue the fight.
Thank you all for your amazing support!
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