Although Steemit is still a relatively small platform it has already attracted some fraudsters who pretend to be someone else. I just saw this post about a fake account for a popular photographer. He's been in touch with the real guy to confirm he's not on Steemit, yet. Of course his preferred name is already taken and cannot easily be recovered.
The easiest way it to link from a site you control that people already trust. It's not easy to build up a Youtube or Twitter account with genuine followers and if it's been been verified by the site then that's even better. I'm not exactly famous, but I've included some outgoing links on my Youtube. Of course it links to Steemit.
If the link on your Steemit profile links to a reliable site that links back then people can be pretty sure you are for real.
You may have noticed the neat badge I have in my signature block. That was provided by SteemVerify. I paid them a small amount and they did some manual checks on who I am. There may be potential for more rigorous versions of this for those who need it.
A geekier way to do this is using cryptography, which is what Steemit is based on. GnuPG and PGP are public key encryption that have been around for decades. As well as being able to encrypt data you can also 'sign' it in ways that nobody else can fake. Keybase is a site that makes that simpler. I have an account there and I have used to verify that I control various accounts and sites by uploaded signed messages to them. You can even verify that you control a Bitcoin address. Unfortunately you cannot so easily verify a Steemit account as we cannot place data in the html and Keybase doesn't know how to verify a Steemit account, yet.
What I can do is to include a signed message in a post as below. If you paste the whole block with all the dashes into this form it will verify who signed it. There's a Keybase app for various platforms that provides things like encrypted chat. I've already linked to a few Steemians using it. Look me up if you already use Keybase.
This is to verify that user steevc on Steemit is the same person as https://keybase.io/steevc Check that page to see what other on-line accounts, sites and other things I control. iQIzBAEBCgAdFiEEpdKE0AWevLT4ByqZQXXc8D+aJBoFAltXc4IACgkQQXXc8D+a Stay safe, and check people are who they say! Spam comments may be flagged. Beware of the Commentphant!-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
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