First time message warning (to prevent scammers)

[partyp]

There have been successful scams of people posing as someone in your contact list and asking for crypto. This happens by the victim assuming the user is their contact and then convincing them to send over some money. It is very easy to make this mistake because the scammer uses the same profile picture and a very similar username. For instance your friend is yourbestbud, and the scammer is yourbesttbud. That paired with the exact same profile pic can be very misleading.

My suggestion to fix this is to have a warning message the first time a user messages another user. Display something like, "This is the first time you have ever talked with this user! Make sure it is who they say they are."

Yes, I realize anyone should be very careful when chatting online and certainly shouldn't send money to someone without verifying the identity through other means.... but a simple message like this would prevent that lapse in judgement.

[maxtaco]

Thank you, we are on this issue.

[partyp]

Awesome! Is there another issue for this?

[wesley-jones]

Yes, this would be very helpful indeed!

[gwillen]

I think it would also be useful if the "following" and "not following" UI colors were more different. Right now my impression is that the UI consistently displays following users in green, and not-following users in blue. It would be easier (at least for people with normal color vision) to see that something's wrong if non-following users were in something like red or orange, instead.

(In fact, it seems like in some places they are both rendered in black, which is even less helpful.)

[gwillen]

Beyond that: honestly, I think there's a reason that most social network systems require some kind of connection request before a chat can happen. You would never accept a connection request from someone typosquatting a real contact. (Facebook used to allow messages from strangers, but Facebook also has rules about names and impersonation.)

This solution would seem to still require some way to chat with someone without following them (but with zero possibility of confusion about whether you are), and it would also require careful screening of people's display names being changed AFTER you chat with or follow them (which may still be a good idea, if such a change is possible, since most people will not be expecting it so it will be another fruitful route for scamming.)

[heronhaye]

This is planned.