Grand Theft Article: How Hoaxers Are Scamming Budding Gaming Journalists

Video games are pretty great, and being able to write or talk about them in exchange for money is even better. What isn't great is having your time wasted by people setting up a fake job listing while impersonating a website and subsequently stealing multiple articles. Just to put the cherry on top, these people also attempted to fool several dozen journalists, including myself, into paying for something that doesn't actually exist. These are not baseless accusations, so it's probably best that I explain.

Making it as a games journalist is no picnic, and many a writer's career starts in a catch-22 scenario: You need previous experience to get a gig at one outlet, but getting that experience elsewhere requires a level of existing experience, before you even get that far. This state of affairs has given birth to a wide market of websites offering unpaid writing positions in exchange for that all-important experience. Now, I'm not saying that this set up is wrong—writing for free can be fine if the author in question can make it work, while doing other things, in order to get a taste for the full-time job. But it does set many budding journalists up with skewed visions of how their job, and its pay structure, should work.

Now, I'm not an accomplished writer by any stretch. Sure, you're reading my words here—but I still work in retail for 40 hours a week to feed myself. As such, I too am constantly on the lookout for opportunities to broaden my horizons and hopefully blow away a few of the cobwebs in my wallet as I do so. However, finding paid writing opportunities is tough, as the majority of websites with open positions will punch out a tweet or post a brief Facebook status about their vacant situations rather than formally list anything on the usual job search engines.

This is where GameJournalismJobs.com comes into the fold. It's essentially the Monster.com of the game writing world, hosting listings from websites at all kinds of levels, both paid and voluntary. And it's here where the problem—the scam—began. During an early January 2016 sweep of the usual watering holes, I noticed Explosion.com was advertising for a paid position, offering $20 per article. I decided to apply, forwarding on the requested documents. I received an email back a week later. I assumed my new contact was called Darah, though I had to infer that from her email address, as she never signed her emails.

Darah said she liked the look of my stuff (see the email above) and requested a previous commissioning editor's email to vet me—apparently, they had a history of applicants impersonating journalists. (Oh, the irony.) A few days later, Darah had decided I was the real deal and requested an article to see how I rolled. This didn't seem unusual to me—I've been told that IGN operates on a similar policy. (Indeed, in a Reddit AMA from January 2015, IGN's executive editor Dan Stapleton mentions writing reviews for free for the website "just to get some practice"; and later the same year, VG247 turned a call for free submissions into an award.) Darah asked me to focus on Destiny, looking at something a little outside the box rather than the typical weapon reviews, giving me until 6 AM the next day to complete the assignment. I was told this at 10 PM the night before, but the competitive nature of the industry has led me to believe this cutthroat approach is acceptable. I completed the task by the ungodly hour of 4 AM, a time I normally only get to see near the end of a bender.

Irritatingly, even after having completed the stupidly last-minute assignment, Darah didn't get in touch for a few weeks. She finally responded when prompted, saying that my article was fantastic, and I had made the cut. The website was currently down, but she mentioned it would be up and running by the beginning of the month, so in the interim I could bash heads with around 30 other new writers and share ideas with them in what she called a "Pitch Pool." Our conversation moved to Skype, where the cracks in Darah's offer really started to show. I added her and was greeted with an account showing a profile picture of Marvel's Venom character (which she also used for her email account). But it swiftly changed to an image of a woman, while her name changed from Laura to Laurence before finally settling on Darrius (see below).

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This identity fluidity put me on edge, and I started to take every subsequent detail with a rather large pinch of salt. The Skype exchanges were chaotic, but I soon deciphered who the other current "Explosion staffers" were: Niki and Ashley. They too had Venom profile pictures and were both incidentally born on the first or second of a month. The contents of the Pitch Pool rapidly turned into a torrent of inconsequential updates, forcing me to close Skype and return to it later. When I did, it mostly comprised of messages babbling about "how great the site will be when it finally launches," until Niki mentioned a scheme she'd been making money from.

This scheme was the heart of their scam, as loose as it was. Rather than get paid for their contributions, journalists would actually pay $20 to gain access to a network of constantly updated URLs of up-and-coming gaming sites that they could then (try to) sell their work to. This list of URLs almost certainly didn't actually exist—nobody on the Explosion side, not that they were actually representing the site at all, could verify anything. Only one thing was clear: There were no paid positions going at the website, and Niki and her colleagues—assuming it wasn't all just the same person behind every name—were trying to take money from the Pitch Pool members and who knows how many more people keen to break into writing for a living.

Not only that, but they were taking freely submitted articles on popular games that they could then sell onto other websites. This was a hoax, plain and simple. Once the issues became readily apparent, the Skype chat evacuated, and the impersonators subsequently blocked many of the Pitch Pool participants, new gaming writers like me, probably in a bid to avoid further questioning after being exposed. Twenty dollars a pop might not seem a lot to make such a scam worthwhile—but multiply that amount by 30, and you're already seeing a healthy return on cheating writers out of their money. And that's before any fees for selling the work elsewhere are considered.

Although I didn't part with any of my own money—and hope other writers weren't suckered—far more valuable commodities were stolen: time and effort. I, for one, flushed almost an entire night down the shitter in a bid to meet a fictitious deadline, producing an article that's now probably floating around the ass-end of the internet. This is depressingly indicative of the competitive state the rising contributors of the games press are facing. Long periods of voluntary work and little clarity on progression options often pave the way for horrendous situations such as the one I experienced by not contributing to Explosion.com.

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A GameJournalismJobs.com admin, "JohnB," has since emailed me, saying that their vetting process remains stringent, and that the paywall for job listings usually deters this kind of activity. This situation likely came about because a previous Explosion staffer had access to the job listing account—something the site's admins can't police preemptively—which might suggest it was this same former Explosion staffer running the actual scam. It's a sorry state of affairs—budding gaming journalists not only have to be vigilant about what they're producing for what reward but also to whom they're applying to work for in the first place. All I can say is be wary of requests, never agree to paid work without proof of payment, and deliver trial articles at your own discretion. And if the website isn't active, as Explosion.com's games section remains, don't bother at all.

However, this is the internet, and taking every headline, picture, and promise with some skepticism should be part of the deal. It's a just shame that many of us, myself included, so easily forget that.

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