Fake Email Subscribers on Substack

Photo by Jaimie Harmsen on Unsplash

Don’t you hate it when people try to ruin your fun or your livelihood.

I believe either someone or various people are trying to do this to my email newsletter and other newsletters on Substack.

Do I have facts? Yes, I do.

You may not even realize it is happening to you.

If you are a writer on Substack, you need to take this seriously.

I’m here to warn you about it.

I started to get a bunch of subscribers in the same day. Now I know I should be happy and I was pretty excited about it. Until I started looking more closely at the email addresses they were using.

They were all using the same unique set up. Then I knew something was up.

How can someone who doesn’t even know the other person have the same email setup?

I started doing an investigation.

Being a computer expert, I did some research. I’m always looking into things that don’t seem right. I knew this was no coincidence that their email addresses were all the same.

All of these subscribers use the same M.O. (Modus Operandi).

I have received 14 new subscribers in less than one month.

One person even signed up twice. Nice try but it’s not going to work!

I don’t know if they are fishing or is it phishing, for personal information or what.

I unsubscribed all of the suspect email addresses. And I’m keeping a list.

I’m not going to list the exact email addresses here but I am going to show you how they are set up. This way maybe I can help any other writers who may have these people on their subscriber list and don’t know that they are suspect.

I think there was talk about this or something similar in Writer Office Hours a few weeks ago.

firstnamewoslastnameu@yahoo.com

Basically it is their first name, then three random letters, then their last name, followed by one random last letter.

They are now starting to use random numbers in the middle of the first name and last name too, like 81u.

Graphic by Matt Murray

This is how they are using the numbers:

firstname4udlastnamec@yahoo.com

They are all coming from an @yahoo.com domain.

Most subscribers are from the US. The other subscribers were from the Czech Republic and they were only 20 minutes apart when subscribing. Now how in the world are two people from the same far away country going to subscribe that close together?

This is real suspect.

They are saying that they are all coming from Substack Recommendations page.

Conclusion

So be careful because if I’m being affected, then you probably are too. It looks they are targeting writers to get whatever information they can from them.

Check your subscribers and let’s share as much information as we can about this.

Maybe I can get

Chris Best

from Substack to look into this.

I would caution any writer getting subscriber emails from these certain addresses.

If any writer on here or

Chris Best

wants the email addresses, I’ll email them to you.

Until next time, happy reading!

-Matt