29 Comments
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Libby Shively McAvoy's avatar

This is such an important problem to speak up about. I am sorry for everything that has happened to you.

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David Mokotoff, MD's avatar

This is awful. I don’t understand why and how people think that impersonating someone else is okay. We have lost our moral compass as a society. While stealing is as old as human existence, the scope and ease of impersonating someone else has grown exponentially online. I agree that Medium has been remiss in not addressing this in a timely fashion.

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Mark Stobbart's avatar

Thanks for speaking out and openly about the negative transgressions taking place on Medium. Indeed it’s sad to see a community take such heavy hits and the toll it’s clearly taken on you personally.

I can share that when I joined Medium last year, I found it helpful to read through the extensive work that you put into making Illumination a success, and especially in seeing that you took care to engage with new writers as well.

I’m sorry that you’ve had to experience scammers and others nashing and undermining your success. I hope you find a better, and are able to rebuild, a stronger community here on Substack.

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Martin Heiland-Sperling's avatar

Dr Mehmet, I'm sorry about what happened. Leaving the details aside, I would like to share my doubts regarding the type of profile you mentioned, namely Remi.

I cannot help but wonder if these types of profiles are "real", or if only to me they appear as means of mass disinformation - the free content accessible to vast masses, especially young people, seems created by a dangerous type of egoic mind aiming to support a deceptive vision of the human experience, that's the one that socially validates self-harming behaviours, such as believing in eternal love the cited profile keeps writing about, and all the stereotypes that much of Hollywood cinema has taught us to accept as "normal" and therefore socially accepted.

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Dr. Gabriella Kőrösi's avatar

I am so sorry that you were cloned again and your good name is used as anti medium Dr. Mehment. I believe you are an amazing person with great knowledge and you have my full support in your writing and publishing journey.

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Mark Armstrong's avatar

How terribly discouraging and frustrating. You must wonder what it takes to get someone to address such a major issue at this point. Hang in there, and thanks for taking the time to alert others.

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Romaric Jannel's avatar

This is definitely a serious problem. I hope a solution will be found with Medium.

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Chau Trieu's avatar

It never happened to me but I do every once in a while receive comments from cloned accounts. How Medium keeps making unnecessary changes but never the important stuff is beyond me... I'm so sorry this happened to you!

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Dr. Preeti Singh's avatar

This is terrible to be cloned so many times with no security on the platform.

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Danielle Benvenuto's avatar

So. damn. frustrating. It's also scary. I remember when my Insta account was hacked. It enraged me and also freaked me out. Sorry to hear that. Sending warmth and hope this goes away soon.

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Denise Shelton's avatar

That’s awful. I’ve had content stolen, but that stuff is the next level. Yikes.

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Lisa Korpics's avatar

I’m so sorry Dr.Yildiz… it’s so violating. I’ve noticed a lot of unusual activity escalating over the past week. I’ve had to report some explicit harassment and block artificial accounts- also on my email just tonight there’s suspicious issues I’ve had to deal with. It’s the ugly side of anonymity online- empowering bad actors. I hope it gets resolved quickly.

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Vince Mao's avatar

It's one of the most insidious things that bottom feeders do in their desperation to leverage what they have not earned...

I'm sorry to hear that this has happened to you, and I wish that there were better and more effective ways to combat this problem. It's a war of attrition, and with each round the scammers get more and more emboldened when nothing is done to stop them. These brazen acts of deception are disgusting, and taking decisive action on our part is one of the small ways that we can push back.

One person has little impact, but when many of us watch out for each other, the effective is unmistakable.

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ILLUMINATION Curators's avatar

We are very sorry this happened to you again, wasting your scarce time. Thanks for the guidance.

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Dr Mike Broadly's avatar

Frankly, I am tired of these scammers as they cloned my account 7 times now, and one time, they spammed everything and caused my account to be suspended. Medium said my profile fell into the spam folder when I was fighting against spammers. It was so weird.

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Aiden MC's avatar

Sorry to read about your challenges, Dr Yildiz. I understand your pain as it happened to me three times and it was awful. But now they changed their tactics making it harder to recognize.

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