A fraud almost stole $9 worth of rewards from us, by using a stock image and fake profile description

Everyone likes to pay special attention to ‘introduceyourself’ post. We like to welcome the new faces in our Steemit community. This is why a fraud @fulerit choses this opportunity to fool us.

She downloaded some stock images of beautiful girl and used that to write her ‘introduceyourself’ post. Her profile description was flawless. Even I got fooled and many people voted for her generously. Yeah, some guy just can’t control themselves when they see a beautiful young girl.

So I saw that she received about $8.98 or something for her post. I can’t remember the exact amount. But I can remember it was almost $9 she received. Her user reputation became 42 within a short time, as she received a lot of comments and votes from people. You can find out what actually happened by visiting here:

My Name is Juli,Hi Steemit

But then something felt so wrong to me when I saw a fellow member @gtg of our community commented on her profile:

Hello, could you please verify your identity?

And that fraud @fulerit replied

I plan to prepare more detailed information. And to confirm my identity. But not at this stage.

Then @gtg said again:

Thing is, that you are presenting here an image of a real person. While introducing yourself doesn't really require you to provide any personal information (here is latest good example I've found), if you decide to do so you should do it in a way that makes no doubts that person who is posting such introduction is the same person as presented one. Here are some serious doubts that's why I'm asking. One of the ways of doing so is posting a selfie with a piece of paper with current date, Steem name or logo and your username. It shouldn't be any privacy concern because you already presented personal image. I'm sorry for pushing that, but this is for protection users on the platform.

After this I decide to take that frauds side thinking that she is new and just don’t know what to do(I am a great stupid person) . So I said to @gtg

I don't think each and every person need to hold a piece of paper to prove their identity. Steemit is already flooded with bots and fake accounts.People are spamming everywhere in this platform. She is new here,so we should just welcome her.Not push her to prove here identity.I think she is pretty much clean.I am also a user in this platform.I don't think I need someone to protect me in here.

Then @gtg replied:

I don't think each and every person need to hold a piece of paper to prove their identity.(my comment he quoted) I agree, and that's exactly what I've written above. However if there are doubts about identity theft / deception, it is really a good idea to provide one. Otherwise people would chose to refuse rewarding dubious content. “Steemit is already flooded with bots and fake accounts. People are spamming everywhere in this platform.”(my comment he quoted) Each of us is responsible for that, and there's no reason to let it be this way. Identity theft is a serious issue. You might not care because it's not your money at stake, but the whole community is paying for author rewards.

So I replied:

Ah,My money is not at stake.Take a look at this profile @berniesanders. See how he makes money writing only one sentence.Here even the bot gets a vote and after all what is the cause of your suspicion??Why do you think something is wrong with her account. She is new here.As,I have said so this is not the time to ask this kind of question.

Then @gtg replied:

Other people actions are not excuse, really. Why do you think something is wrong with her account.(my comment he quoted) Because he/she used a stock photo available on the Internet. I've already wrote in my comments here. There's no point in hesitating with verification in such case. Past cases shows, that the only reason is the identity theft.

After that I finally realized what happened and I replied to @gtg:

oh,dude now I understand.Thanks for watching out for us.It is true we need more people like you.

Finally what happened

Next day I wanted to check the status of that post and saw that it got hidden. That member reputation dropped to 13 from 42.All the money she made by fooling people was taken away from her.

That fraud finally received his or her punishment. I don’t think it was a girl at all.

I felt so sorry for arguing with @gtg without knowing anything. I went to his profile and saw that he is actually a whale. A good friendly whale who has been here since the very beginning when Steemit was launched.

I felt sorry for saying that he don’t need to protect us. We really need people like him for watching over us and to protect us. We also need to be more skeptics in our attitude towards new people. We should look after each other.