THE LONGER I REMAIN ON SUBSTACK THE MORE I REALIZE what a petrie dish for the worst society has to offer it has become.

I tried out two public sites offering writers the opportunity to get a wider audience for their work, Medium and Substack.  Not wanting to duplicate my efforts, and feeling Substack had better tools and a wider reach, I gave up on Medium.  Maybe that was a mistake.

The radio is perhaps my primary source for information as well as entertainment, and hearing references to noted personalities and journalists like Julie Kelly having Substack pages helped push me in that direction.

However, a harsh reality has struck.  As was recommended to me by another (unnamed purposely) Substack  member, my audience is not other Substackers!  The recommendation made by this respondent to my post was to start mentioning my Substack page on other social media sites. Ugh.  But that’s the world today: You have to put yourself out there and then drive the eyeballs to you.

Pause for a moment to mention in a semi-hypocritical way, that I despise “social media.”

My fault was in thinking that Substack wasn’t social media, but was a platform for serious writers.  At first, the founders attempted to deny the fact, but then co-founder Hamish McKenzie on the Substack blog admitted that it was a social media platform, after all.

In her article “We’ve been thinking about Substack all wrong,” author Isabelle Roughol writes,

Substack pretends to be the CMS that powers the new independent media era, when it’s really a platform of the old scale era. The second you look at Substack as social media, it starts to look a whole lot better. I’m even ready to argue that as social platforms go, Substack is one of the better ones for creators in a field that is notoriously exploitative. It’s easy to use out of the box (sort of). It enables fast growth (that’s at least half real). It provides transparent(ish) monetisation. It lets you (mostly) own your audience list. It doesn’t cost you a thing until you earn something (then it takes quite a bit of it). That’s why I see little harm in larger publishers such as New York Magazine trying out Substack as part of a broader social portfolio or creators using it as a process blog, without intending to make it their main income.

She includes a nifty hand-drawn graphic:

Isabelle Roughol’s sketch on Substack’s promise-vs-reality

I have personally experienced her observation that “It enables fast growth (that’s at least half real).”  Over the past few months, I’ve seen substantial “growth” in (free) subscribers, yet a cursory examination of those new subscribers suggests that 50% of them aren’t real.  They are ‘bots, scammers, or both.  Yes, I have been scammed!

My “Spidey sense” is now heightened.  For the time being, I continue to write on Substack, but I don’t respond to subscribers until I’ve vetted them.  That simply means that I check their profile page and check to see how many posts they’ve written.  If the number is zero, I disregard them as troublemakers, miscreants, or maybe even criminals.  In other words, I ignore them.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me!

The sheer irony of all this is that it seems I’ve come full circle.  I founded this site/page in 1996.  Substack arrived much, much later — in 2017.  The beauty of having my own site is that I control everything about it.  I’ve just never tried to promote it.  So, in my unnamed source’s view, perhaps I should just drop Substack and focus on publishing and promoting my own content.  If I can’t believe Substack’s subscription metrics, why should I bother?

I HAVE NO ONE TO BLAME BUT MYSELF.  I write this as a cautionary note.  Perhaps someone reading this might be warned against falling prey as I did.  Here is my story, and the red flags I missed (or ignored).  If this is TL;DR, scroll to the bottom for the recap.

The scam I fell victim to was based on the concept of “AI Arbitrage.”  As we should know by now, AI stands for “Artificial Intelligence.”  It’s the hottest thing going in the computer world.  The premise is that AI can be used to trade crypto currencies much like day trading on the stock market.  Since AI purportedly works at computer speeds, it buys and sells crypto as the prices fluctuate across markets.  Sounds plausible, right?  It did to me.

In July of 2025, I began writing in earnest on Substack (see my previous post).  At one point, I received a comment from a reader who seemed interested in what I was writing, and we began exchanging chat messages.  This person was identified only by a first name and last initial:  Mary H.  The chats were pleasant, and I enjoyed some personal interaction.  At one point she suggested moving to Telegram, as a better means to continue to communicate.  That should have been a red flag, but at the time I didn’t see it as such.

We continued to have friendly chats.  I should mention that Mary presented herself as a 30-ish divorcée, a small business owner and entrepreneur living in California.  Let me say right here that having an intimate relationship with a woman younger than my daughter was never a motivating factor!  She was nice, and I often mentioned the disparity in our ages and life experiences.  We were simply “friends.”  Toss out the idea of a sexual “honey pot.”  In fact, greed wasn’t my motivation either.  I think the fascination of technology was what got me.  However, the age difference between us should have been a red flag, also.

Our original conversation on Substack is still saved, so I can retrace back to the beginning.  One red flag I definitely saw was that Mary’s profile on Substack was gone.  Her avatar and username were still listed, but her presence on Substack is missing.  In my ignorance, I thought perhaps she wasn’t into writing and had simply quit the site.  Substack only timestamps the date and time a conversation begins and not every message, so I can only report that the first saved message with Mary occurred on July 24, 2025.  By July 26, the conversation had edged into the territory of money.  She asked if I’d read the book, The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel.  I confessed that I had not, but checked it out from my library.  We continued to chat about the book, other books and topics in general, and then on July 28, she asked me about my thoughts on AI.  As one who spent his career in the technology field, we talked about the current state of tech, and then on July 29, she asked if I’d heard of AI Arbitrage.  Looking back, it’s amazing that all this took place in just a few short days!  Another red flag!

So it began.  Over the messaging capabilities of the Telegram app, Mary walked me through the process of creating a bitcoin “wallet,” transferring money from my bank to a crypto exchange and converting it to the bitcoin of choices.  In this case, it was Ethereum, one of the more popular crypto currencies.  The next step was to deposit the crypto into an account on the AI arbitrage account.  Finally, submit an order.

Newcomers are allowed to “sample” the system by opening a very limited two-day order.  But only twice.  At this point, I was playing with “mad money,” which came straight out of my checking account.  I thought that if I lost it, it would be a lesson learned, but not the end of the world.  I made my two orders and each returned a profit, which I converted back to cash and sent to my bank.  I made $465.89.  For doing nothing!  Since I had used the available two-day orders, the promise of greater returns on a three-day order appealed to me, with an additional influx of cash.

Uh-oh.  You can see where this is going.  I had the cash in my checking account, so it was a simple matter to wire the funds needed as before and enter the order.  Nothing to it!  Three days later, I saw a nice, but not obscene return, so I thought to repeat the process.

I won’t say that greed didn’t enter into my decision.  I’d like to think that it would be a nice “cushion” to have in my retirement funds.  Maybe pay off a car loan.  Donate to the church.  Maybe some home improvements.  I wasn’t thinking “overnight millionaire,” but perhaps I was relishing the idea of splurging a bit.

Then came the first disaster.

According to the “rules,” which I never saw, if a three-day order cannot be filled due to no available “slots,” the “system” automatically moves the order up to the next “tier,” which in this case was a five-day order.  The only problem now was that in order for a five-day order to be submitted, sufficient funds to cover the system-allocated amount were required.  I did not have these funds in my checking account, so under assurances that I would be able to withdraw those funds upon completion of the order, I went to my retirement financial advisor and requested a withdrawal from there.  Order satisfied, completed, and all was in order.  I did this twice.  At one point, Mary even added some of her own funds to help me make the minimum amount.

Mary had mentioned that I should become a “VIP” member, which would allow me to set fine-grained limits on future orders, but when I inquired, I was told my “bank” was short the required amount.  Oh well, all I had to do was place three-day orders and set a limit on the allocated funds.  I did so, and it worked out.  By now, I had actually seen some profit, even though there was more work involved than I’d thought.  Still, I already had funds in my “bank” so I placed another order.

And waited.

Nearly 24 hours later, I saw on my dashboard that I was registered for a nine-day order!  From a three-day order to a nine-day order was extraordinary.  The problem was the funds needed to complete the order.  However, I was tapped out.   I had no more funds in my retirement account, no income save for Social Security and what had previously been my savings.  As I write this, five days remain until I lose my (figurative) shirt.

RECAP

To restate the original line, I HAVE NO ONE TO BLAME BUT MYSELF.  Below are the red flags I should have seen and the warnings some due diligence would have kept me from being scammed:

1. An unknown person with no traceable identity reaches out and engages in conversation.  Okay, that in itself is fairly benign, but when asked to take it to Telegram (or another platform–especially one I don’t use–is a warning flag.
2. This same person does not have, or no longer has an account on Substack where we first connected.
3. When AI Arbitrage was mentioned, I should have done better research.  I did some cursory investigation, but mostly on the technology, which is why it first appealed to me.
4. Querying perplexity.ai about AI Arbitrage scams has yielded a wealth of information.  It’s likely the only wealth I’ll see from all this.  I won’t paste everything, but here are the salient points.

• Scammers set up convincing platforms, apps, or trading bots that claim to use advanced AI.
• They leverage buzzy jargon.
• Victims are pressured to deposit money, often encouraged by staged fake returns (they might allow a small withdrawal at first to build trust). The platform may show simulated profits but prevents withdrawals once larger sums are deposited, using excuses like extra fees or system upgrades.
• Some scams involve fake arbitrage bots or smart contracts advertised on social media
• Romance and social engineering tactics are sometimes used, where trust is built over time before introducing the “AI arbitrage” investment opportunity

Other than the last item, and there no romance was involved, but I can’t dismiss social engineering, the list isn’t a clear tip-off.  However, there’s more.

Again, none of these hallmarks stand out, but if nothing else, there are a lot of ways to be taken.

I have recently begun writing articles on Substack.

Substack logo

Those articles are much like the articles I write here, but they have a wider, built-in audience.  I have never made the effort to drum up readership here, and as a result, this site is mostly a forgotten breadcrumb on the Internet.

This is not a complaint.  When I first began the Music For A New Age web site, my main purpose in doing so was to learn and implement HTML.  As the years passed, the site morphed into what is seen today:  A WordPress blog site.

Using the site as a “sandbox” has allowed me to employ it as a development platform.  I’ve created a “pseudo-forum” as a proof-of-concept (which was not accepted by my then-employer), a storage mechanism for files and data I could access anywhere an Internet connection existed, an exploration of cascading style sheets (CSS), which is now the landing page at https://www.mfna.org.

My Substack is where I am actively developing my writing skills.  In my opinion, the writing tools are less flexible than are WordPress’s, but the main point of my doing so is that I get readers without having to do any promotion.  Thus, I can improve my writing, and the feedback I receive helps me do so.

There is a bit of a concern I have.  Substack has numerous categories one can scroll through, search, and “silo” articles.  I have not found a way to categorize my articles there as I can here.  My as-yet-unproven sense is that authors who stick to a specific category get more readers.  One of the writers I follow, Julie Kelly, an investigative reporter, writes exclusively about politics.  I have neither the expertise nor the discipline to always write on a single topic.  I have multiple interests, and write about what I know, what I’ve seen, what I’ve experienced and what I I wish for.

So, my Substack isn’t replacing this site.  In the long run, perhaps it will make my writing here better.

Not long ago, I received an email advertisement from someone or something named André Assous.  I had never heard of this brand, so I thought nothing of it and deleted  the email.

But I continue to get advertisements, now quite obviously spam messages from this André Assous.  The little bit of research I did on this name reveals that there actually is such a person, and there is such a company.  Apparently they are a shoe company.

I have never bought shoes from André Assous, and at this point I won’t be buying shoes from them.  This is why, short and sweet.

Since I had never heard of André Assous, André Assous obviously heard of me by buying my email address.  Okay, I know that’s done all the time; it’s part of how the Internet functions.  On a whim, I clicked on the “unsubscribe button in the email.  Now, I know well enough not to do this, but I was curious to see what would happen.  Believe it or not, sometimes this actually does work!  But not in this case.  The unsubscribe button in the André Assous is a dead end.  André Assous isn’t even polite enough to throw a “404” (page does not exist) error, it’s just a blank, dead page.  Thanks, André.  (The U. S. Federal Trade Commission has a mostly unhelpful web page about Unwanted Emails,, Texts and Mail, in case you’re interested).  More than likely, André Assous is making more money by selling email addresses than by selling shoes.

So, quite obviously, I am somehow now forever cursed to receive spam from André Assous. And while I can’t stop them from sending them, the wonderful SpamSieve software from C-Command makes it so I never have to see them.  In the end, the good guys win out.

(I have purposely used André Assous’s name many times in this post.  If he or his company scrape the web looking for references, I hope they read this.  And know that I curse you and will never hesitate to give you and your company a bad opinion).

The subtitle of this blog is “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.”  It’s been that way since I first started web publishing in 1996.  It’s axiomatic that free advice is seldom welcomed, and worth what one pays for it.  This is why I have never opted for a “paid subscription” model.  I doubt many would want to pay for my opinion.

I feel the same way about the current trend these days to monetize opinion.  Medium and Substack are both subscription-based web sites that provide a platform for anyone with a keyboard and an opinion the means to express themself.  They offer a free level, of course, because to not do so would hinder new subscribers, but often writers will put the majority of their content behind the site paywall, blocking free readers.

Far be it from me to attempt to prevent someone from earning money from legitimate means.  But the freedom to charge for a good or service also implies the freedom to refuse to avail oneself of that good or service.  Opinions are not like food and housing.  I choose to not subscribe.

Podcasts are another form of this capitalization of opinion.  Most podcasts I come across have a pay-for-play component to them, but offer the meat in the sandwich for free.  Ain’t capitalism great?

Don’t get me wrong.  I read a lot.  I’m on the web daily.  I have numerous news and specialty sites I use to inform me of news and information.  I even pay for instructional content (I’m looking at you, Active Melody).  But I find it difficult to pay for someone’s opinion.

There are some terrific thinkers out there.  I’m amazed by the likes of Victor Davis Hanson.  I’m delighted that I can read many of his pieces free, thanks to sites that publish him as a guest contributor.  Hanson posts many articles for free, and as many do, offers a “premium” subscription service.  Great.  But no, thanks.

Please note:  I began this article mentioning Medium and Substack.  Not as a slur, because I have accounts on both of them.  I simply do not choose to put my writing behind a pay wall.  I also have a Patreon account simply because I support one of the content providers I enjoy listening to.  It’s music, not opinion, so even though I’m not a fan or Patreon, it’s the best way I find I can support the efforts of the producer.

Newspapers (remember them?) often had a section for editorial opinions.  Cleverly referred to as the “op-ed” section, the authors, typically ranking figures of the publication, had a place to speak their minds.  These op-ed pieces came with the subscription to the newspaper as a whole, so in there was a value add if you only wanted opinions.

Who would pay to read or hear someone else’s opinion?  Would you pay for mine?

But it’s big business these days.  The famous quote attributed to Andy Warhol, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” appears to have been finally realized.