In late September, I put out a call for pitches from freelance journalists. As an editor at The Local, an online magazine in Toronto that wins awards for its long-form journalism, I have a stable of dependable writers I like to work with. But we’re always trying to bring new voices onto our site, and an open call for pitches on a specific theme has, in the past, been a good way to find them.

The last time I’d put out an open call was more than a year ago, when we’d received the usual stream of ideas—some intriguing, most not quite right for us, but all recognizably human. A year later, things were very different.

My request this time was for stories about health care privatization, which has become a fraught topic in Canada. Over the next week, I got a flood of story ideas from people around the world. Some, from writers in Africa, India, and the U.S., obviously weren’t right for a Toronto publication. But many had the sound, at least, of plausible Local stories.

One pitch in particular seemed promising. The writer, Victoria Goldiee, introduced herself as having written for The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Maisonneuve—Canadian outlets that publish the same kind of feature writing we do. The pitch tackled the idea of privatization with a catchy angle about the rise of “membership medicine.”

“The story would track how these plans transform health care into something resembling Netflix or Amazon Prime, and what this means for a public system that has long prided itself on universality,” it read.

What set the pitch apart from other emails suggesting similar stories was the amount of reporting the author had already done, as well as her collection of bylines. Victoria said she’d already spoken with a number of people—a 42-year-old consultant in Vancouver, a 58-year-old construction worker in Hamilton, and health care experts like Toronto physician Danielle Martin, who she quoted as saying “membership medicine is a creeping form of privatization.”

When I googled her, I saw that Victoria had written stories for a set of publications that collectively painted the picture of an ambitious young freelancer on the rise—short pieces in prestigious outlets like The Cut and The Guardian, lifestyle features in titles like Architectural Digest and Dwell, and in-depth reporting in non-profit and industry publications like Outrider and the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. Her headshot was of a youthful Black woman. She was, according to her author bio, “a writer with a keen focus on sharing the untold stories of underrepresented communities in the media.”

At the next editorial story meeting, we decided to take a shot on Victoria and assign the story. Then I began looking more closely at her work.

There were some red flags. The first question I had was whether she was actually in Toronto when so many of her bylines were in New York magazines and British newspapers. And how had she managed to do so many interviews already? Doing so much reporting without the guarantee of pay felt like a big gamble.

When I googled “Victoria Goldiee” with the names of the Canadian publications she said she’d written for, there were no results. We reached out to Danielle Martin, one of the doctors Victoria claimed she’d interviewed. Martin said she’d never heard of her.

I emailed Victoria back: “​​Are those quotes from your own interviews? And do you mind sending along some clippings, perhaps from your Walrus or Maisonneuve stories?”

She sent a lengthy reply the next day. “The quotes I included in the pitch are from original interviews I’ve conducted over the past few weeks,” she insisted. “In terms of previous work, I write a regular newsletter for The Walrus, which gives a good sense of my ability to balance accessibility with depth while speaking to a broad audience.” She attached a link to The Walrus’s “Lab Insider” newsletter that did not have her byline.

“I can 100% confirm that they do not write the Lab Insider newsletter,” wrote Tracie Jones from The Walrus when I emailed. “How odd to say they do!”

Victoria’s stilted email, and a closer read of the original pitch, revealed what should have been clear from the start: with its rote phrasing (“This story matters because of… It is timely because of… It fits your readership because of…”), it had all the hallmarks of an AI-generated piece of writing.

I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where “health and money collide,” flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.

But if Victoria’s pitch appeared to be an AI-generated fabrication, and if she was making up interviews and bylines, what to make of her long list of publications?

Two weeks after she first pitched me, and after spending far too many hours trailing the path she’d cut through the internet, I emailed Victoria Goldiee asking if we could talk about her story.

By that point I suspected she was making things up in publications around the world, but I was hoping a conversation could get me closer to some answers.

We set up a video call for later that week. Ten minutes before it was set to begin, she emailed to change plans. “I look forward to chatting in a bit, I’ll be joining via phone so it’ll be a voice call on my end,” she wrote, signing off with, “xx.”

Moments later she was on the line. “Hi Nick!” she said, chipper and upbeat, speaking through a crackling phone line. To my ear, she sounded like a young woman with an African accent.

I asked her where in Toronto she was based. “Bloor,” she said cheerfully, naming one of the city’s busiest commercial thoroughfares without missing a beat. If she was just naming one of the first streets that comes up when you google “Toronto streets,” I couldn’t help but appreciate the effort.

Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud—where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more “content” have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.

Freelance journalism in 2025 is an incredibly difficult place to build a career. But, it turns out, it’s a decent enough arena for a scam. On their website, Outrider says they pay $1,000 per article. Dwell’s rates start at 50 cents a word—a fee that’s difficult to justify if you actually want to interview 10 of the top designers in the world, but a healthy payday if you only need to enter a few words into ChatGPT.

Not every Victoria Goldiee story I looked at raised the same questions. A writer by that name had, in fact, spoken with actor Nico Santos for a story in Vogue Philippines, according to his publicist. Others were impossible to debunk with certainty. Had Victoria actually interviewed an incredibly elusive Korean production designer for a story in Architectural Digest about how people were, apparently, redesigning their rooms to match K-dramas? I can’t say for sure, and Architectural Digest did not respond to questions about the story. A story she published in October headlined “20 iconic slang words from Black Twitter that shaped pop culture”—which was syndicated across dozens of small-town American newspapers desperate for content, from northeast Mississippi to Waynesville, North Carolina—contains lines like “‘Brazy’ is another word for ‘crazy,’ replacing the ‘c’ with a ‘b.’” Is that story written by AI? It’s impossible to know and, frankly, impossible to say if it even matters.

My favourite “Victoria Goldiee” story is a piece she published in The Guardian just last month. It’s a first-person essay without quotes, and thus difficult to fact-check. In it, Goldiee—who told me she lives in Toronto, writes as an American in other work, enthuses about the daily jollof specials at a restaurant in Ghana in yet other writing, and lists herself as based in Nigeria elsewhere—vividly describes discovering underground music as she moves through life in 21st-century England. It follows her from a Somali football league in east London to “Morley’s fried chicken shops lit up after midnight” and “community centres that smell of carpet cleaner and curry.” It’s a rousing argument that real culture happens in real spaces, between real human beings, not in some cold, computer-generated reality. “The future of our music,” it reads, “is not written by algorithm.”

“Wonderful article,” reads one of many approving comments.

“Beautiful message that a lot of people aren’t trudging wide-eyed and brain-dead through this increasingly soulless, corporate-heavy… modern world,” reads another. “They are socialising, communicating, loving and laughing and making culture like real, thinking, feeling human beings.”

In the days after our conversation, Victoria’s online writer’s portfolio vanished. Her Muck Rack page (a listing of a journalist’s published works) was switched to private. An X account with her handle that had shared previous stories disappeared.

As I emailed the editors of the publications I’d been investigating, one by one Victoria’s articles came down.

The climate story at Outrider disappeared, replaced by a 404 error. Outrider did not respond to questions about their editorial process.

The Guardian story came down, with a note saying it had been “removed pending review.”

The story at Dwell was removed. “An investigation concluded that the article, ‘How to Turn Your Home’s Neglected Corners Into Design Gold,’ did not meet Dwell’s editorial standards, and as such, we’ve retracted it,” said the editor’s note in its place.

The Journal of the Law Society of Scotland removed Goldiee’s article and editor-in-chief Joshua King published an apology to the journal’s readers. “On the balance of the evidence available, it is now my belief these quotations were falsely attributed to the interviewees and are likely to be fabricated,” he wrote. “This is professionally embarrassing and this apology is an article I am disappointed I have to publish.”

In an email, King explained that the quotes in the piece “raised no red flags because they were, in all honesty, what I would have expected those quoted to have said.” He added: “Sadly I think editors and publications are at risk from bad actors.”

Those bad actors are already here. This summer, the Chicago Sun-Times published an AI-generated “summer reading list” filled with books that didn’t exist. Here in Toronto, independent publication The Grind was forced to postpone an issue after they took a chance on some new writers and were inundated with “scammers trying to pawn off AI-generated stories about fictional places and people.” Earlier this year, at least six publications, including Wired, removed stories after it was discovered that the articles, allegedly written by a freelancer named “Margaux Blanchard,” were likely AI inventions. The suspected fraud was discovered only after Jacob Furedi, the editor of the independent publication Dispatch, received a suspicious pitch and began digging into the writer’s work. According to reporting from The Daily Beast, after the revelations, Business Insider quietly removed at least 34 essays under 13 different bylines.

After weeks of trudging through Goldiee’s online mess, I went back to my inbox to deal with the rest of the pitches that were still sitting there waiting for me. I was a freelance writer for most of my career, so as an editor, I’ve always done my best to respond to every thoughtful pitch I get. Looking at them now, though, all I could see was the synthetic sheen of artificial intelligence. There were probably some promising young writers buried in there somewhere. But I couldn’t bear to dig through the bullshit to try to find them.

I idly googled the authors of a few of the pitches that looked most blatantly written by AI. I saw their bylines across the internet—a web of lies and uncanny half-truths entrenched so deeply in the information ecosystem that no one could possibly have the energy to dislodge them—and I was struck by a brief but genuine moment of bone-deep despair. Then I closed my laptop.