Q: What do you think about all the scams in our industry and can you offer some guidance? There are all kinds of scams on Twitter and other communities online.

A: This is a rampant problem throughout the entire crypto/blockchain industry. People are impersonating companies on Twitter, Slack, Rocket.Chat and Telegram, and sending phishing emails—it’s a constant and every day challenge. Our community leaders do their best to notify people and users of these scams, ban malicious users from our communities, and stay on top of the latest scams, but there’s still a constant deluge of scammers trying to impersonate Storj Labs and other companies online.

Nearly every crypto company has experienced the same thing. Just this week, Chris McClure and the Svandis team issued an open letter to Twitter and Jack Dorsey, urging them to address the huge issue with bots, scammers and abusive behavior on the platform. We also signed the letter, as we have experienced issues with bots attempting to scam our community via Twitter accounts impersonating Storj Labs.

We try our best to work with the platforms to combat abusive behavior. We made some changes on Rocket.Chat to reduce the flow of fraud there. We highly encourage anyone, if you see impersonators on Twitter, to report them. We’ve done our best to ban and remove abusive accounts on Reddit. The problem resembles whack-a-mole and I don’t think there is a perfect solution.

We will never do any Storj giveaways that require you to send us any private key. Users should never send their crypto to Storj Labs, unless they are paying for services as a user. Farmers should never pay any Ethereum, Storj, or other cryptocurrency to join our community. In short, it helps to have a healthy dose of common sense. Just like anything else, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Watch out for yourself and we will do our best to watch out for you and keep these scammers out of our various forums and online communities.

If you ever receive any communication from Storj Labs, it will always come from some domain at storj.io. If you are ever in doubt about an email that claims to be from Storj Labs, please forward it to support@storj.io and we will verify its authenticity.

—Shawn Wilkinson