Linda Geddes discovered that someone had been using her name to approach editors at scientific publications. The impersonator used an email address that did not belong to her, pitched stories under her identity and created a trail that reached beyond one journal.
The case became stranger when Geddes learned that the same person had targeted her former colleague, Caroline Williams. An editor at Science was convinced to commission and publish an article under Williams’s name, and the impersonator received about $1,000 for the work.
Fake Linda also pitched a story to Science, but that attempt failed. Around three weeks before 17 Oct 2026, an editor at Nature Medicine contacted Geddes to ask whether she had been pitching to the journal and to Nature Health. She had not.
A trail through recovery accounts
The first useful clue came from a simple account check. When the fake email address was entered into Outlook.com’s account recovery system, it revealed a partially obscured Gmail recovery address. An editor at Science had found the same address pattern linked to the email used by Fake Caroline.
That connection tied the two impersonations together. It also showed how a basic recovery screen could expose a link between identities that had been presented as separate people.
Caroline Williams summed up the mystery with a short question: “Why us? We’re nice!” Her name had been used to secure a published article, while Geddes’s name had been used in approaches to editors at scientific journals.
The activity was not limited to one unsuccessful pitch or one paid article. The New York Post article connected to the case had been lifted from previously published features without attribution. The New York Post removed the article, carried out an internal review and referred the matter to authorities.
Where artificial intelligence may fit
Many of Fake Linda’s pitches bear the hallmarks of AI-assisted writing. The impersonator may be using AI to make the process more efficient, turning the tools into part of a wider effort to create convincing pitches and submit them under another person’s name.
That does not answer the central question: who is behind the accounts, and why target these writers? The impersonator might be a struggling freelancer, a public relations professional or someone testing vulnerabilities in publishing systems. The known facts leave each possibility open.
The potential harm reaches beyond a single byline. Using someone else’s name can damage that person’s reputation, create confusion for editors and raise concerns about financial gain. A fake pitch may also force publications to spend time checking whether a familiar writer really sent the message.
Prof Eric Topol was mentioned in relation to similar issues in April. That reference places the Geddes and Williams impersonations within a wider concern about people using trusted scientific names to approach publishers.
Dr Simon Miller, director of policy, strategy and communications at the UK fraud prevention service Cifas, described the case as highly unusual. “Ordinarily, if you’re seeking to defraud, you’re seeking to do it at scale, in a relatively light-touch way, using mechanised, industrialised processes. This is tantalisingly unusual. It’s almost the stuff of Agatha Christie, but with 21st-century technology.”
That comparison captures what makes the story so unsettling. The mystery depends on familiar details—an email address, a recovery account and a published byline—but the tools behind it can help one person move between identities with little warning. For Geddes and Williams, the result was not fiction: someone had used their names in the real publishing world.
