Warning: Not everyone is who they say they are
Fraud on Twitter
Today was an interesting day.
Last night on Twitter (sorry I refuse to call it X) I received a message from Freida McFadden. For those who don’t know Ms. McFadden is a very popular mystery/thriller writer. My local Barnes & Noble has an entire table set up for her books. So first impression I was pretty excited.
I went to her home page and saw that she had just a little over a 1,000 friends and followed about half that amount. Her page was full of tweets from her about her books and images of other people talking about her books. It was a pretty good job of making it look like it was her page.
Except for the small amount of followers.
I googled her and found her social media site is mainly Instagram. She has a Facebook page, but Instagram seemed to be where she did most of her social media posting. And on that page, she had over 100,000 followers.
This morning I woke up to another message from her.
I asked her right away if she was really Freida McFadden and her response was “I am Freida McFadden.” The way she said it was kind of weird.
I really didn’t believe she was who she said she was, but I figured I’d keep it going for a while. (And there was a very, very small hope that maybe she was.)
She asked about my work and how I got the word out it. The conversation went on for a while. There were large gaps where she didn’t reply back after I messaged her. In between one of those gaps I went to Facebook and sent a message to the Freida McFadden there, asking her is this one was her.
Oh, and the Twitter McFadden was @FreidaMcFadden0. Another sign that it was a fake.
Well after I told her I was on Substack and building an email list she suggested that it might be worth my time to buy an email list. Now we were getting somewhere, I could see where this was going. I told her that I didn’t want to just buy a list of people’s names, how would that help me?
Of course, she had an answer, she worked with a marketer who narrowed the email lists he sold to the subject needed.
And I’m sure you all can see where this is headed. Before long she was giving me the name of her marketer and giving me his Twitter handle and telling me it didn’t cost that much, only $200. I knew eventually she was going to get to the money part, I was just waiting to see how she got there.
It was around this time that I received an answer on Facebook from the real Freida McFadden, who told me she had no presence on X. I let her know what was going on and then went and blocked the Twitter McFadden and reported her.
Always be careful of who you talk to on social media. Especially if they’re coming across as the solution to your problems and you don’t know them. Or someone famous messages you out of the blue to tell you how they can help you. Even though it’s tempting to believe them, don’t. Until you can prove that they are who they claim to be 100%, it’s a scam.
Be careful out there.