Answer or ignore a message
People decide this on politeness, which is the wrong axis entirely.
Ignore anything unsolicited about your account
- What you gain
- Nothing to evaluate, no judgement to get wrong, and no conversation that can be steered.
- What you give up
- You might occasionally ignore something harmless.
- Suits
- Everyone. The cost of the mistake in this direction is nothing.
Reply, then judge
- What you gain
- Feels reasonable, and occasionally the message really was ordinary.
- What you give up
- A reply confirms the account is live and attended, and the interaction is designed to be steered rather than judged.
- Suits
- Nobody, for anything referencing your account, an order, or a payment.
Reply asking them to prove who they are
- What you gain
- Feels rigorous.
- What you give up
- They will produce something plausible, because producing something plausible is the whole job. You end up assessing a performance.
- Suits
- Nobody. The channel is the answer, not the content.
The channel settles most of it
No market runs support, announcements or an official presence on a messaging app, a chat group, an email address or a forum account. Anything presenting itself that way is impersonation regardless of how established it looks, which means there is no judgement to make about which contact seems genuine.
Requests that are never legitimate
| The request | How it is framed |
|---|---|
| A wallet seed or private key | Migration, verification, recovery, proving the wallet is yours |
| A password on a page you did not navigate to | Session expired, confirm your identity, security check |
| A second factor code passed to a person | Support needs it to unlock the account |
| Payment outside escrow | Faster, cheaper, escrow is having problems |
| Lowering your browser security | The page will not work otherwise |
What tips it
Whether you initiated the conversation. Contact you started, through the platform, about an order you placed, is ordinary. Contact that arrived is a different category, and the useful rule needs no expertise: a message that wants you to act inside a stated period is telling you what it is, because nothing genuine here operates on a clock.