Scammers Are Running Riot On Medium
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
A couple of months ago, I received a reply to a comment I had left on one of Bella De Paulo’s articles. The comment, which looked like it came from the author itself, asked me to contact her on a telegram account as she was looking for writers to join a “writers community”. I opened the profile page of the person who left the comment and realized that this wasn’t the author of the article who was replying to me but someone else. I still thought I’d give her the benefit of the doubt and decided to contact her on Telegram anyway. May be she created a secondary account handled by someone else just to do this particular work?
No sooner had I contacted her, did I start smelling a rat in the operation somewhere. The telegram message promised me membership to a writers community where I would receive a “supportive environment for writers to hone their craft and connect with other writers”. They also promised weekly payouts for articles written through the writers community on topics provided by them. In fact I had received the exact same message Louis K posted a screenshot of in his article, “I Intentionally Reached Out to Scammers on Medium.” here.
Firstly, for an established writer like Bella, the grammar and sentence structure of the message was way off. Secondly, why would she…
