Caught In The Act of Plagiarizing

We must all be on the alert for story stealers

It wasn’t me that was caught — and nor was it my story that was copied.

A couple of days ago I was checking out the top stories over at Vocal Media — that’s pretty much all I bother to do over there — I recognized the first few lines that appeared on the thumbnail of a featured one.

After clicking and doing a quick scroll through, it was the same story that I had read, loved and commented on here at Medium. So I was puzzled when the name attached to the story was not the same as the author was here.

It was a story masterfully written by the incredible J.J. Pryor and had me hook, line and sinker right to the end.

My curiosity was aroused. Perhaps J.J. used a pseudonym over at Vocal — but the name was not typical of a pen name. I also wondered why a top writer here would bother sending a 6.8K article to Vocal.

It sounded fishy to me. So I sent a private message to J.J on his story, voicing my concern.

Sure enough, it wasn’t him. Some douchebag had copied his story and posted it to another platform. The ‘writer’ changed the title slightly and added different pictures, but otherwise, it was ad verbatim.

Oh, the nerve!

I was seething. Why would anyone even contemplate copy-pasting someone else's work? Don’t they know the consequences? Sheesh, you can get hucked out of University for not citing a sentence.

My thoughts were racing; if he copied one story, then he has likely copied more. So I stalked his work; I screenshot all four pages of it and read a few that sounded atypical of his others. Most of his writing was about food and travel but there were some saucy ones about intimacy and orgasm.

I copy-pasted the Vocal titles into the search bar here on Medium. Although I didn’t come up with hits — he didn’t appear to be a Mediumite, nor have stolen anyone else's work from the random…

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