Club Meedz Mystery
Going on a Bot Hunt
Somethin’ fishy going on with A.I. profiles
I had two new email subscribers this month. While many writers are too famous to notice such a tiny baby bump, my meager email list felt the pains of pre-natal swelling. It’s a special moment in your writing career when you must use more than your hands and feet to count fans.
I was thrilled until noticing something odd about my new best friends’ email addresses. They are nearly identical.
AND
The Mystery
If my unpaid Medium detective internship with Victor Cardenas taught me anything, it’s “pickles are gross.” Victor’s wisdom, more pertinent to the mystery at hand, is to “follow the clues.
Packing up my Dora the Explorer Cybercrimes Discovery Kit, I decided to learn more about Amy and Amanda.
Amanda, the more popular of the pair, has a solid group of readers with 2.4K followers. Upon closer inspection, her profile reveals she’s only been a member for six days.
How did she get so popular so fast? Easy. By writing two-hundred-and-eleven stories during that time. Amanda, when do you sleep?
Could you imagine my surprise when I went to Amy’s profile and learned she ALSO joined Medium six days ago AND has an insane writer output of 231 stories?
Stories that happen to all have the same image and the forensic hallmarks of A.I.-generated dumpster rubbish?
Coincidence?
To give Amy and Amanda the benefit of the doubt, my imagination ran through several scenarios where they might be legitimate. Maybe they hit the 1 in 152 trillion chance of signing up for email service, only to find the ideal name taken and grab the next one on the list.
They may be ardent members of a club of daily outdoor enthusiasts, and the club ranks the members in chronological order. What if they met adventuring and became best friends with matching emails, only to further discover they both loved writing sooooooo much? 38.5 stories a day, never stopping to eat, poop, or sleep.
A real possibility is that the emails match because it’s the SAME person.
[Queue the fog machine and stage lasers for that big reveal.]
One person having two accounts does not automatically equal a nefarious A.I. bot. Plenty of authors have pen names, and some of the most successful people on Medium have more than one account.
Like Jason Provencio and The Professor of Medium.
Or Smillew Rahcuef and The Wife of Smillew.
I’m a nobody and have found two Medium accounts that help me find my voice and express creative freedom. That’s why you can find my humor under the name of Mark Suroviec, M.Ed. AND Barack Obama. ¹
Except for this fact
So, it is theoretically possible. But what are the chances that anyone likes my writing ² enough to subscribe to my emails ³ and their FOMO over missing my sporadic turd nuggets leads them to sign up with BOTH of their emails. ⁴
It’s time to bring in some help.
Turn it up to 11
I sent the screenshot to some writer friends, and the image added more fuel to the fake account fire. One of them had two subscribers with the EverydayExplorer prefix. But it wasn’t the same two. She had number 1 and number 11.
Eleven!
There are at least eleven of these fake accounts.
Since they appear to be in linear order, my investigation took me down the rabbit hole in a way had not considered. I typed each medium handle into my Chrome browser in order. Let’s see how many people belong to the Everyday Explorer Club.
Everyday Explorer Club Members
- Amy
- Amanda
- Andrew
- 404 Error
- 404 Error
- 404 Error
- 404 Error
- John
- Mary
- 404 Error
- Lori
- 404 Error
- 404 Error
- 404 Error
- 404 Error
My search ended after fifteen possibilities finding six active accounts. Less than I expected, but far too many for Medium to ignore.
Takeaway
Let’s do better Medium. Not only the tech folks at in San Francisco, but the nearly 10,000 people who follow these fake accounts.
Yikes.
Footnotes
¹My sincere apologies to the former president, his skilled legal team, and any secret service agent responsible for reading stories he’s tagged in.
² 1 in 10,000
³ 1 in 4.5 million
⁴ 1 in some insane theoretical number used in string theory
Thanks to Nicole Kinkade and The Sturg for helping to bring light to this scam.