For at least the past two years, scammers have been posing as FADER writers and demanding money from independent musicians in return for coverage.
The scammers typically use Instagram and DistroKid, but they’re across social media. They might have stolen our photos to pass themselves off as us more convincingly, or they might just post screenshots of articles we’ve run on the site to their grid. We know from the hundreds — literally hundreds — of people who have reached out to us about this that it usually starts with a DM saying they like the artist’s music, then progresses to asking for a fee for the artist’s name to be mentioned on TheFADER.com. The scammers keep asking for escalating amounts of money until the artist gets suspicious enough to call or email The FADER — or realizes, too late, that it’s a scam.
