Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 11/5/17> so, you want to give me $200 Steem?

People, people, and people I was born at night but not last night. Just because my picture is rotated sideways in Steemit chat doesn’t mean I can’t spot a con or scam, it means I couldn’t get the picture to rotate to a vertical orientation.

Yesterday I decided to visit Steemit.chat and see if I could find anything or anyone interesting over there. Well I decided to drop into the post promotion chat room and take a look around. It can be a good place to meet people and find good content links to stuff over here on Steemit.com. I met an artist over there the last time I visited that room from Palestine, @samer484, damn good artist and nice guy.

Well things were a little different for me on Saturday, I was browsing through the many posted links when I get a “ding” on my computer and I see I have a personal message from someone I had never met before. After the “hello’s how you doing “ back and forth texts that always start a conversation the person asks me “How would you like $200 steem?”

I know how I would like it, I’d like it from people reading what I post and up voting my posts, but that wasn’t my response. “Why would you want to give me steem?” was my reply.

The nice thing about Steemit is that you can quickly look at someone’s page and see if they are legit and this person had a 75 REP. While I was there I also peaked in their wallet to see if they even had $200 steem. Holy smokes, this person had steem, like six figures strong not counting decimal points. Since I was there and already looking I scroll down and look at transactions. This person had transferred out numerous amounts of steem in the $200 range, some smaller, some bigger to several people.

So I popped back over to chat and there was another message,”I have too much steem “was the message. I’ve never heard of having “too much” steem, and even if I had I would expect the person to say that they are a whale just trying to help the minnows.

“Sure go ahead and send me some steem.” I sent back to them. I get back a response saying that they need me to send $15 SBD. Say what? “Why would you need me to send to SBD?” I asked. They informed me they were short on SBD but had too much Steem.

This smells a little “fishy” now, anyone who has that much steem would know that it is easily transferable to SBD. So I told them how it seemed fishy and if they were truly who they claimed to be jump over here and up vote my blog post for 11/4/17 so I could see that they were, who they claimed to be.

Here was their response, “?”

So I explained it again. That was the end of that little chat session, nothing ever came back from them.

Someone had stolen the name and picture from the page of a highly reputable steemian and was trying to pull a scam on a little minnow. The story doesn’t end there though, I would track down the real person from that account and let them know that I suspected someone was posing as them in chat and trying to pull off a swindle using their name and identity.

I found a post that the real steemian had commented on and slipped a reply in apologizing first that the comment I was making wasn’t related to the topic they were discussing but that I thought that they would like to know what had taken place.

Three hours or so later I got a reply back saying, “yea, I know, the moderators shut the guy down.”

Well the good thing is the moderators were doing their job, if indeed they shut the person down, or did my questioning the situation cause him to stop trying to pull his con on me? If they indeed did shut him down I can reasonably surmise that my stringing the conversation along by questioning the person and asking them to perform a task that would cost them nothing had to help the moderators spot this con artist. So I feel good that I was able to help stop an attempted swindle.

The one thing that really disturbs me from this whole situation was that the person with the high REP and six figures of steem in their account could not even take the time to type “thank you” for taking the time to contact him.

I guess just because you have a bunch of steem doesn’t necessarily mean you have manners.

So, if you want to send me $200 steem, don’t ask me for $15 SBD. Just transfer it to me and I will be sure to send you a “thank you” note.

Until next time,
@sultnpapper