https://cdn4.vectorstock.com/i/1000x1000/59/78/beware-sign-or-stamp-vector-27335978.jpg

Beware of Levitrares.com

Heads up — sites hijacking Medium

Frederick Bott
2 min readMay 11, 2022

--

If you are like me, you might have noticed it is much easier to find our own stories on Google, to post links to, than it is to try to find them in Medium.

Until today I thought that was risk-free effort saved.

But this morning I realised I had posted something not so good to another author, Ryan Boudinot, intended to be a link to my historical story announcing VRENAR (My longstanding Metaverse project), was going solar powered.

Sorry again Ryan, profound apologies, I hope no harm done.

The actual link I meant to post to Ryan was this one:

But what he got… well, I won’t give the hijackers the satisfaction of me posting the link here in searchable text for the web crawlers to pick up yet again, but it takes us to a seemingly identical real-time page, that looks like this:

Looks Kosher, right?

But if we zoom into the address bar in the image, we see this is actually a page from a website called “Levitrares.com”

I don’t know what their aim is, but clicking anywhere on that webpage which looks just like my page in Medium, gets us all kinds of clickbait ads and challenges, which are probably not good to respond to.

At first I thought Medium, or the internet was somehow broken, maybe by the volume of skull-duggery going on in it at the moment, but actually this probably pre-dates the current cyber war going on.

I guess there are probably many more besides “Levitrares” doing this kind of thing, but presumably they are unauthorised to do so by Medium.

Anyhow, I hope this helps educate anyone who hasn’t seen it before, besides me.

If you use Google to find links to your stories in Medium, heads-up!

{On thinking again about what might be going on with this, I am not so sure it is actually hijacking at play, but for now, best to treat it as such, as it appears to have exactly the same effect… stay safe}

--

--