WARNING
Watch out for scammers on Medium
No checking or editing here, I’m just going to quickly write what happened and get this out there in a hurry.
Watch out for people who join and have few posts.
There was a man here on Medium calling himself Stuart James. He posted one poem, then an introduction to himself. He said he was a widower, who had lost his wife and prior to that his daughter, and poetry helped him memorialize them.
I complimented the poem and was surprised that he quickly thanked me — via email. It seemed strange. An inner red flag started up the instinct pole.
His next email asked me a few innocent questions about myself. I responded and asked him a couple of questions.
He managed to sidestep full answers and smoothly changed the subject back to me.
Without giving much detail he made it obvious he was in the military, currently stationed in Yemen.
Get Gayle Reynolds’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
By the 3rd day of correspondence, with still few life details about himself, the red flag was all the way to the top of the ‘this is creepy’ pole.
So today I sent him a list of subjects I wanted him to address since the exchanges in the conversations were extremely one-sided. I wanted detailed information.
My last question was “Why did you delete your Medium account immediately after you began writing to me?”
He got the message that I wasn’t buying his story and began telling me his history, including military rank. “Commanding Major General”
Thank you, that’s just what I needed! One quick search led me to General Stuart James — the one this scammer was trying to sell himself as.
He also told me that he didn’t delete his Medium page: “I was receiving messages from other women who seemed to be interested in my writings, and I felt that could complicate what we’re trying to build here.”
Somehow he knew “we” were building something in just a few minutes? Lordy Gordy, I had no idea I was such a catch at 80!
The last time this scam scum (or he and his group of goon scammers) used this particular name seems to have been in 2017.
Now that I’ve called him out by sending him the link to the military scam site, he could be using any one of the dozens of names listed on that site.
