Some say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. However, we at Stellar are extremely concerned that Stellar’s imposters may be dangerous scammers or phishers. Stellar’s social media imposters are up to no good: many want to collect your private information and private keys to steal your identity, accounts, lumens, and other cryptocurrencies. Recently, we’ve spotted Stellar imposters on Slack, Telegram, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, and emails. We’d hate to see anyone in our community hurt by these people.

Here’s a quick guide to protect yourself from scammers and phishers when interacting with the Stellar team:

The Stellar team will NEVER ask you for your private keys. We will NEVER ask you to deposit funds to any wallet address. Our official Twitter account is @StellarOrg (https://twitter.com/StellarOrg). Our official Facebook account is @stellarfoundation (https://www.facebook.com/stellarfoundation/). Trust no others! Our official website is https://www.stellar.org/. When you want to visit the Stellar website, type https://www.stellar.org/ directly into the browser address bar and then bookmark the site. Only use the bookmark to visit the site. Always check the full URL before entering any personal information -- make sure, for example, someone did not replace an “l” with an uppercase I! Our employees will email you from emails using the @stellar.org domain. Before sending private information, please reply to the email and wait for a response. This is to ensure that someone is not impersonating a @stellar.org email account. When in doubt, tweet at us (@StellarOrg) and we will instruct you whether a communication is trustworthy. All official partnerships and announcements are made on our Twitter and website — please do not fall for any third party rumors or speculation. If you see a reposted announcement in any other forum that does not contain a link to the original information on our web site, it is fake. Only trust what you see on the http://www.stellar.org/ website.

Lastly, a few quick notes:

Lumen giveaways have been completed. We do not plan on sponsoring another giveaway, except through verified partners such as SatoshiPay and select cryptocurrency exchanges. Please do not fall for social media posts that ask you to give personal information for free lumens.

We may periodically offer 300 XLM giveaways to a small number of people who physically attend our meetup events, but the instructions to claim these lumens will be emailed out to participants from a stellar.org email address and will ask you to enter your information on an official https://www.stellar.org/ webpage.

webpage. For those with a large quantity of lumens, we suggest that you explore storing your lumens in a Ledger Nano S, a hardware wallet: https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/ledger-nano-s. Please make sure to follow all the instructions to ensure that your lumens are securely stored!

We love our community and are grateful for everyone’s support! Please stay safe.