Once in a while, we have some abusers entering the blockchain. With the premise of earning some small money on the side, people will resort to everything and that includes stealing someone's identity.
When this account surfaced, a few of my friends already noticed that something is not right. We run some checks with @kembot the sister of HivePH bot to see if there's something that we can use as a starting point but it pointed us to none.
Technically, since the account is new, very few interactions happened per se. But that doesn't mean that our suspicion is already closed. So we dig the rabbit hole a little.
We checked the wallet :delegations tab and saw that the Hive power he has is coming from a user that we marked as an abuser. The said user was suspected to create post using AI tools thus getting downvotes from other people. I did not check that thoroughly, but when spotted I tried to call out and left a comment on what he did.
I received no response from there and I think he left the account already after that.
Now going back to the identity theft case of the new account since the man is posting pictures with watermark it wasn't hard to pinpoint a good lead. Now the problem is, who's going to send a message?
If possible opt in using my personal account thus checked if I can use the Hiveph community page or my other FB page to verify but there's no send message option 😢
More often than not, it is Adam or Jazzhero who's contacting pages/people to determine the ownership of the accounts but since they are now busy, might as well give it a get-go.
I messaged out of the blue with no expectation of an immediate response because usually messages from someone you do not know are routed to spam etc. I myself don't read messages in my Facebook thus I have more than 90+ to be read in my inbox include group chats etc.
After a few minutes, I got a response that he does not own the account in Hive and asked where did he get the photos. I informed him that most likely it is coming from his public post/ tagged images. He mentioned that his account is private thus no pictures should be surfaced.
Since his personal account is private, then that means the theft is one of his friends.
Getting the necessary details, we downvoted the account and even send it to other people so that they can flag the new post, diminishing the rewards to be given. It was a good thing that this stopped prior to him getting the payout for the introduction post that he created.
What do we get from this experience?
There will always be bad actors here trying to reap rewards and may resort to such acts. You will never know who, maybe someone you know or someone you don't. The rewards earned here may be small but then again, it is free money in the end, and if accumulated that can still be huge in the future.
It is okay to be skeptical,and having a tight-knit community as a Filipino it helped us in a way to determine who are folks around. Sure enough, the admin and moderators of Hiveph cannot point it out immediately as there's a new account being created from time to time but once we see got an alert of a possible case then we do the digging, etc.
Getting Hive known to everyone is okay. But we need to make sure that the people we onboard will not be creating some fiasco such as these cases, as this can also affect your reputation. This isn't a hard rule, but most likely when an investigation is going on, someone might question it afterward.
On a positive note: I tried to invite the real Jovanie to join Hive too in that way, he can have the chance for his works to be monetized (even if it is just cents) .
This information will also be shared in the next onboarding session this Saturday 03/11/2023 at 08:00 PM MNL Time. If you are from the Philippines and you are new to Hive I would suggest that you join our discord server for the said webinar.
I still have a mountain of workloads to do irl thus the announcement post isn't published yet nahhh I am just getting lazy these past few days.
That is all and thank you for your time.