Community Announcement: Concerns for Growing Spam and Scam Accounts on Medium

Let’s be aware of the increasing number of cybersecurity risks on Medium and protect the integrity of our accounts and the platform.

Dear Readers and Writers,

This brief message serves as a notification regarding the increasing prevalence of counterfeit accounts on our platform. These fake accounts replicate writers’ profiles, engaging in impersonation by duplicating their photos and profile names. Although we previously addressed this issue in a bulletin last month, unfortunately, the story encountered a glitch and went unnoticed by our subscribers and followers.

Given the significant impact on our community, we must revisit this concern. Just yesterday, one of our editor’s accounts was cloned, posing a potential threat to deceive their readers. We appreciate your attention and remain committed to maintaining a secure and authentic user environment.

Please check out this story by Mike Broadly, DHSc.

Our chief editor, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, has been a repeated target of this unsettling practice. Last month, these fake accounts struck twice, infiltrating his story on Medium Friendship and inundating reader comments with phishing emails. Unfortunately, some readers fell into their alluring comments, pretending to be Dr Yildiz. He wrote an informative story about it.

The same issue happened to our other editor, Aiden, last month who also wrote two stories about the incident.

One of our consulting editors, David B. Grinberg 🇺🇸, wrote an interesting story about the critically important reasons why Medium should be more transparent with users about these phishing scams.

How to Identify Them?

These fraudulent accounts typically lack followers and haven’t authored any stories themselves. They are non-members with no star or heart icons in their profile names.

Rising Bot Accounts and Spam Posts

In addition to cloning writers’ accounts, these bot accounts constantly spam the platform and contaminate the topics pages with scammy posts asking readers to call their helplines. Here is how the topic pages look with these spammy messages. Please don’t open them and report immediately.

Mike Broadly, DHSc wrote an article about this yesterday.

Here are some eye-opening comments on the story.

Here’s the key message from our chief editor Dr Mehmet Yildiz

“The escalating proliferation of counterfeit accounts on Medium transcends mere inconvenience, posing a formidable threat to our community’s trust, integrity, and safety. These deceptive entities disrupt the essence of authentic engagement, inundating our feeds with dubious content and eroding the credibility of genuine creators.

Encountering these accounts not only jeopardizes users’ exposure to scams and misinformation but also results in a loss of valuable time and a dent in trust. For Medium itself, this poses a significant risk to its authenticity, potentially alienating creators and readers.

A proactive stance by Medium is imperative. Implementing tighter verification processes during account creation, strengthening innovative reporting tools, and enhancing algorithms are pivotal steps to curb the surge of harmful accounts. Equally crucial is education, empowering users with the knowledge to identify and report counterfeit accounts to safeguard the integrity of Medium.

Recognizing the telltale signs of these fake personas — such as a lack of followers, non-member status, and unconventional language usage — can bolster our collective vigilance. Safeguarding Medium’s integrity is a shared responsibility that demands collaborative efforts between the platform and its users.”

Here are the guiding stories by Dr Yildiz.

Thank you for reading our bulletin. We wish you the best.

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