SCAMS
WARNING! Fake Medium Website Scraping Stories
They stole your intellectual property
[Author’s Note: As a humorist known for satire, I feel obligated to tell the reader this story is actually true.]
The Sturg spotted a website stealing Medium author’s intellectual property, and my first reaction was:
🤮🤮🤮 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮¹
My face is boiling, my kids are screaming — unrelated to the scam — and I’m ready to go on an old-fashioned beatdown.
For security and practical reasons, the website’s name and URL are hidden. We don’t want the douchenozzles running the site to get a spike in web traffic.
What are they doing?
The website has a prompt to “Paste the Medium Link” and a big green button to “Capture the Article.” I’m no techie, but when you read the word “Capture” on a scam site, they are not talking about sustainable “catch and release” recreational trout fishing.
The site has several recommendations of stories and publications you should steal from.
Maybe it’s my naivety or dark humor, but sometimes I find scam behavior funnier than scary or dangerous. Because my popularity flies well below the radar, scammers leave me alone, and I move on to playing with my kids or making fart jokes.
Then Sturg showed me this.
The fake website had my profile and my ten most recent stories. Including my experiment in suspense fiction that no one read.
In a few minutes, we found profiles for Selina Miyasia, Jason Provencio, The Sturg and other Medium friends in our Discord server.
What happens when you read a story?
I looked at my own story. Halfway down, the story is interrupted by this message.
“We are sorry this is a paid article, and we can’t display it. If you want this feature please reach out on Twitter [Scammer’s Twitter Name]
Some quick digging through WHOIS by The Accidental Monster and Robin Wilding 💎 revealed this phony site to be hosted in Iceland, and is targeting readers in Egypt as a way to bypass censorship laws.
Emily B, who knows professional websites to check IP abuse, tracked the perpetrator to England. She found a name, a city, and GPS coordinates. If any of our British writer peeps feel especially James Bondlike this evening…
Emily is also writing her breaking news piece while I’m editing mine. When hers is published, please read it.
Those are the facts as we know so far. However.
Wild and unfounded speculations
The timing of this website is concerning. Are these Scrapey McScraperson’s the same people as the Everyday Explorers that Medium successfully squashed? Are they retaliating against Sturg, myself, and the hundreds of writers who reported them recently?
Probably not.
But wild speculation is fun sometimes.
How you should respond to the scam site
I have no idea. I am hoping Tony Stubblebine, Buster Benson, and the Medium Staff can give some advice on how to proceed.
Footnotes:
¹ With an emoji wit like THAT, I was destined to become a writer. ;)
