Despite My Love for the Community, I'm Not Attending the Medium Day This Year

My profile was cloned again today! For 15 hours while I was sleeping and away at a family gathering, a scammer exploited my innocent readers, leaving the platform vulnerable due to Medium’s inaction.

Photo by Nathan Cowley from Pexels

Dear friends,

I apologize for my lengthy and raw message from a few days ago. I don’t want to overwhelm you with details, but I felt it was necessary to explain. Remi now has 181K followers, thanks to a boosted story by a Medium employee who highlighted her as a hero. Meanwhile, so many authentic writers pour their hearts and souls into their craft yet struggle to get even a handful of views or followers for their well-crafted pieces. This situation concerns the community. I shared my five years of struggles in running ILLUMINATION yesterday. It has been a painful yet rewarding journey,

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Why I Sent This Post Today in My Ruined Weekend

The purpose of this story is that stalking scammers cloned my account and spread rumors saying I was leaving Medium and urged my readers to leave the platform urgently, and the secret will be revealed from a scammer via a WhatsApp call to:

Please avoid calling this number if you don’t want to risk losing your personal information or hard-earned money. Over the past 12 months, I’ve written many stories about this issue, but Medium censored them and placed me in distribution jail while allowing scammers and spammers to run rampant, deceiving Friends of Medium. Despite my repeated pleas, nothing was done, leaving authentic writers exposed to these threats.

My loyal readers ask why I am leaving Medium urgently and why they should leave as well. The truth is, I never did and never said such things in reality. They ask why do I sound like American on the phone and how I changed my Australian accent 🦘 Why I ignored the question and hung up the phone and did not answer again. Tragically, some of my readers, trusting the invitation, called the number and unknowingly surrendered their personal information to an imposter.

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I won’t waste my breath reiterating the frustration I’ve endured, as many of my stories have already been buried by Medium’s elusive algorithm, silencing my voice from reaching both my authentic and fake followers on this epidemic.

I wrote a heartfelt story documenting my concerns. If you are interested, you can read it for free via my friend link below:

New Readers Associated My Name with a Fake Writing Club for 12 Months; Now, as an Anti-Medium

If you have had such experiences, please consider leaving a comment on the story so that we inspire Medium to take action to protect our wonderful community.

Please note that I never ask anyone to leave Medium. On the contrary, I encourage our writers to use both Medium and Substack wisely to grow their audience and increase their income sustainably. If you hear such rumors, please disregard them—they are simply untrue.

This situation is no longer exclusive to Medium. It recently happened on Substack as well, even at a bigger scale to my friend

Tim Denning

. I wrote about it as well to raise awareness. You can read it both on Medium and Substack.

I was badly scammed in 2022, losing some portion of my hard-earned retirement funds after 42 years of service in the corporate world. It was the most painful moment of my life. I don’t want this to happen to you. Please stay alert, protect yourself from scammers, and take good care.

Thank you for reading my post. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

Dr Mehmet Yildiz

Owner and Chief Editor of ILLUMINATION Integration Publications on Medium.com and Substack.com.

I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my friends and volunteer editors

Dr Mike Broadly

and

Aiden MC

for calling me personally in Melbourne, Australia, and easing my stress on such a challenging day. Your kindness and support truly mean the world to me.