Beware of Illicit Sales
Writers, Resist the Urge to Purchase Guaranteed Claps, Comments, & Highlights Available for Sale Online
An urgent call to remain vigilant against the emergence of new alarming scams infiltrating Medium Partnership Program and concerning the community
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Our moderators on ILLUMINATION’s Slack workspace recently detected an unusual and concerning fraudulent message in public channels and private communications. This incident has raised significant alarm among us and shows the prevalence and brazenness of such fraudulent activities.
While we refrain from sharing specific links for safety, security, and privacy reasons, we feel compelled to alert our community to these scams and urge writers to remain vigilant. The sophistication and organization behind these illicit activities are evident, signaling a new and troubling trend in fraudulent behavior.
Yesterday, our moderators on Slack workspace received a flood of inquiries from our 21,000+ members, expressing deep concern and frustration. This stemmed from the audacious actions of a spammer who, masquerading as a legitimate entity, inundated our community with unsolicited private messages, flagrantly exploiting our privileged service with automated messages from bot accounts.
These messages prompted recipients to contact an email address, call a WhatsApp number, and even use a Fiverr gig to purchase services aimed at artificially boosting their earnings through the Medium Partnership Program. Such actions have understandably elicited frustration and concern within our community, alarming our volunteer moderators.
The spammer’s audacity escalated when they inundated all our public channels with invitations to engage in this illicit activity, brazenly linking to a Fiverr gig. This gig offered writers the option to purchase engagement in three tiers, promising specific numbers of claps, highlights, and reads under the guise of organic growth. Such blatant promotion of guaranteed results is deeply concerning.
Upon visiting the Fiverr site, we discovered that this service was openly offered with detailed information. Intrigued, our moderators delved deeper into Fiverr to ascertain whether this incident was isolated. However, they were astonished to find several gigs selling guaranteed claps, highlights, and readings from various accounts.
We suspect these services may employ bot accounts to rapidly expand and disseminate their questionable offerings to many writers on Medium. Nonetheless, we are deeply troubled by Fiverr’s acquiescence, as a global entity, to the unchecked proliferation of such illicit services.
Our moderators promptly disabled the offending account and reported the incident to the Medium support and trust team for immediate investigation and action. Given that it is the weekend, the investigation may not commence immediately, but we trust that Medium Staff will address this issue promptly.
Offers of this nature often seem too good to be true and can be especially enticing to new writers. With over 10,000 new writers in our community, we implore them to resist the temptation to engage in such fraudulent activity.
It’s crucial to note that participating in these practices can result in the suspension of their accounts, as Medium employs software to detect fraudulent activities, such as artificially boosting engagement. Our chief editor wrote a story about recent account suspension to give us valuable perspectives on the challenges of the platform.
When you receive messages on our Slack workspace asking you to contact them, we implore you not to engage with these illegal services and instead report the activity to the Medium support team via help.medium.com. Please also inform our moderators when you receive new messages like these.
In addition, to help prevent the proliferation of such illegal services, we encourage you to report any suspicious activities on Fiverr or other online platforms to the site owners. This way, they can take appropriate action, such as disabling the scammers’ accounts and preventing them from creating new ones.
Medium and our publications are open platforms that give a voice to writers of all levels and from all corners of the globe. However, it is disheartening to see some individuals abuse this privilege and resort to dishonest tactics in an attempt to gain a competitive edge.
Medium is intended to be an ad-free writing platform that promotes and facilitates authentic storytelling and delivers enjoyable reading experiences to our audience.
If you observe any suspicious behavior related to your stories, community platforms like our Slack workspace, or social media, please report such activity, providing evidence to the Medium support team.
By doing so, we can collectively work to investigate and halt the dissemination of illegal services. Our shared responsibility is to uphold this platform's integrity, ensuring it remains a safe, secure, and enjoyable space for all.
ILLUMINATION has been steadfastly serving thousands of writers and readers for four years. We are committed to stopping plagiarism and curbing harmful content such as defamation, and hate speech. Our volunteer editors dedicate their time to meticulously screening materials, preventing their publication.
As a robust and compassionate community, we recognize the urgency of supporting Medium in this formidable challenge. To that end, ILLUMINATION’s leadership team is mobilizing a supplementary task force comprised of our volunteer cybersecurity experts, ethical hackers, detectives, data scientists, attorneys, and law enforcement officers from multiple countries.
Your timely input to our new task force will provide collective intelligence and empower our community and Medium. We will create a channel to report such incidents and have experts analyze them. Together, we will combat these scams and strive to make this wonderful platform more enjoyable and sustainable for all of us. ILLUMINATION is designed to illuminate society.
Recently we shared a brief interview we conducted with Dr Mehmet Yildiz, our chief editor and owner of ILLUMINATION publications, to guide us on the new partnership engagement rules posted by Buster Benson, director of Product on Medium Blog. Please read this interview to learn about the new rules. If you have specific questions please leave a comment on the post and we will answer them.
Thank you all for reading our bulletin. We hope you find this post helpful and would appreciate your feedback. You can contact Dr. Yildiz on Slack and if he cannot respond to your queries quickly, you may get in touch with his volunteering backups Aiden (Illumination Gaming), Lawson Wallace, The Sturg, Mike Broadly, DHSc, InYah, or K. Joseph.
Helpful Resources for Beginners
You may find helpful stories from the content management collection of Dr Mehmet Yildiz written to help new writers join Medium.
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To join our vibrant publications, please send a request via this link. We will help you gain visibility and succeed as a writer on Medium. Please mention the publication name with your Medium account ID in the request.
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ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR, ILLUMINATION Book Chapters, The Lampshade of ILLUMINATION, Technology Hits, SYNERGY, Readers Hope, Illumination on YouTube, Illumination Gaming, Illumination’s Nutrition, ILLUMINATION’s Blog, EUPHORIA by Dr Mehmet Yildiz
