Humor
Catch Us If You Can!
A sonnet of scammers have Medium playing whack-a-mole
Wow look at that, I feel such excitement Medium’s alliterative macher Took time to reply to my advisements Then I see, just scammers saying gotcha
Challenged Buster to game of whack-a-mole I hear them laughing just like Bugs Bunny Elmer Fudd, don’t enter our rabbit hole While nitwits keep sending us their money
You implement new anti-spam filters So we decide to poke you in the eye While many writers still out of kilter In your face we toss another mud pie
Teach your suckers, eliminate demand Until then, we’ll keep y’all doing handstands
For a hot second, I thought Buster Benson had replied to my response to his now-famous comment on Nancy Santos’s massively popular piece of meta, Missing People on Medium, Where did everybody go?, in which Buster alerted those concerned that Medium had “been ramping up some new anti-spam and anti-fraud measures.”
In response to Mike Broadly, DHSc’s The Pain of Losing Substantial Subscribers in a Single Day, Learning the truth behind this disappointment relieved my concern and enhanced my compassion, but we need action as a community, I left this comment:
As for the clone accounts and their spam, it’s simply insanity that Medium doesn’t employ measures to stop the cloning. It’s easy to set up a system whereby an account cannot have the same icon and name as another account. They could also employ a system that AI reviews comments to block those that are clearly spam by recognizing when they are just requests to be contacted outside the platform.
As several readers clapped it up the board and replied in agreement, including Zivah Avraham, who has experience with such matters (see her Proper Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance, Or how Medium created a disaster out of a crisis), the next day I went back into Buster’s comment to repeat my suggestion directly to him. Now eight days later, I thought, yes, Buster’s replying! Quickly, I noticed there was no member star or FOM cute heart symbol on his face, and realized I would see something like this when I clicked:
I captured the screen because I found it so amusing and ironic, and then reported and blocked the account. It didn’t occur to me to write about it until an old, trusted, and oft-cloned Medium friend suggested I write a funny story about it. I’m glad I did. I had fun with this. I hope you chuckled. Check out the cartoon characters I referenced.
Teach your suckers, eliminate demand Until then, we’ll keep y’all doing handstands
I wrote those and all the other italicized lines in the voice of the scammers. Please, no one should take offense from the word suckers and please do be vigilant and don’t fall for these scams.
A friend texted me last week that she received another response from one of Dr. Ylidiz’s clones. I saw another one two weeks ago. I imagine he’s now been cloned countless times. He would never seek money from writers. I wonder if they clone actual course providers like Sinem Günel?
We all need to laugh, yes?
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
