For those of you who don’t know what Medium is…
Medium is an online platform where writers and readers meet. I personally write and publish my articles on Medium and also own a publication on Medium called Fake Love. I’m sure you know what it’s all about.
The Responses I Receive from Scammers
The moment you post something on Medium using certain tags, such as cryptocurrency or scam, you attract quite a few scammers responding to your post.
I must admit that this has become a pattern recently, particularly with the article titled ‘Be Aware of Cryptocurrency Recovery Scams.’
Today, I received a notification from a person called Paul Gnaba:
… and he’s a real-time scammer. How do I know? Let me explain by starting with his comment.
He claims that Coin Hack is a company that helped him get a full refund. A company with a Gmail address. I wonder if their website is gmail.com.
Let’s have a look at the scammer’s profile.
I’ll start with his name: Paul Gnaba.
According to Forebears, the surname Gnaba is quite a popular surname in West Africa, especially in the Ivory Coast.
So, we’re dealing with a West African scammer here, even though he’s a caucasian man in his profile photo.
The reason for this is:
He’s using a Turkish neurosurgeon’s photo. The real person’s name — or we could say the photo victim’s name — is Dr Kerem Bikmaz. Unfortunately, Dr Bikmaz’s are widely used by scammers, especially from Nigeria.
Pretty much every other day, one of my anti-scam sisters shares a fake Instagram account within our private group that uses Dr Bikmaz’s photo for us to report.
Now, let’s have a look at this scammer’s posts, shall we?
His first post on Medium dates back to July 10, 2024, and he has only four posts altogether.
The second post was published 12 hours ago, the third one was published 5 hours ago, and the last one was published at the time I took a screenshot of the home page.
The interesting thing is that the last three posts are exactly the same. Have a look yourself:
They’re repeat posts, which is against Medium’s quality guidelines.
I don’t know why their AI doesn’t pick up on this and wait for someone like me to report the account, and then take action, if any is taken. Because I reported the response to my post here, as well as reporting the account and all four posts by the scammer individually. Still, Medium hasn’t done anything about it.
Another interesting point here is that those three identical posts have their whole content posted in the title font! Here’s an example:
Clearly, this scammer doesn’t know how to use the Medium editor. But here’s another interesting point: I received a response to my same post on Medium — the one Paul Gnaba responded to — and the response is identical to his, even though it was from a user called Kim Li.
At least, Kim Li didn’t dump their copied and pasted response into the ‘subtitle’ section.
Now let’s have a look at Paul Gnaba’s first post:
In this first post on Medium, as seen above, the scammer is advertising someone else’s services, claiming that the amount recovered was $150,000 USD. However, in his response to my post, as well as in his three other posts, the amount was only $10,000. On top of that, he was recommending Coin Hack Recovery, not RecoveryDarek.
These all indicate that this Paul Gnaba personality, who’s lurking among us, is a scammer, and I’m still waiting for Medium to do something about it.
A note on reporting scammers on Medium…
When you report an account or a story on Medium, these are the only options you get:
There should be more options as far as scammers are concerned because these limited options create a loophole, and they are easily abused by the scammers, who are professional cybercriminals.
Unfortunately, most platforms are full of scammers and the platform owners and their team are doing so little to protect their decent users. Medium is not an exception, which is quite disappointing.
Update: In the end, Medium did remove the profile completely. When I say in the end, I mean several days after I reported the scammer.
