I just spent a week going back and forth with a freelance writer who wanted to see his piece published in this newsletter. TO be honest, the piece had great potential. I needed some changes in it, and he quickly accommodated. The message had purpose.

I hadn’t had red flags before then, but while he did a rewrite, I did a deep dive into him to see if he might be in any way affiliated with AI or a con artist from a third world country. I get a ton of both.

I had hope for this piece, but my gut told me to look harder after I studied his resume…then his email.

Three different emails with all of them Gmail, and two of them with names I could not read much less pronounce. Every single link in his bio led to places I’d never heard of before except one, LinkedIn. Then I looked at where he claimed to be from, and it ranged from West Virginia to California to UK to Asia. His resume was posted with a company that blatantly promoted itself as AI-friendly. He had no presence on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, etc.

When I questioned him in very clear language about his lack of clear identity, he said he had different emails because his was hacked a while back, and that he used a friend’s PayPal address instead of his own. Sitting alone in my study, I literally laughed. This was not the first time I’d been told this very thing.

But it wasn’t funny. The piece wasn’t bad at all, and I scrutinize submissions. In this case, the writer didn’t feel legitimate to me. He gave up easily when I told him why, too. In essence, his reply was “my bad.”

I cannot express this enough. Write well. Pitch well. But also have a definitive online presence. I’d rather pay $100 to someone who writes a column for a small town newspaper for $50 a pop than someone in Asia using AI pretending to be American, no matter how well they write.