Press Gazette said on September 3, 2026 that it had been unable to confirm the existence of four more prolific finance and cryptocurrency writers, extending an investigation that began in May 2026 and now covers more than 1,000 published articles across upward of 30 outlets.

In short

Press Gazette, a British media trade title, this week reported that four additional finance and crypto writers, active across Forbes-tier publications, could not be verified as real people despite repeated attempts to reach them. This matters to marketers and publishers because it shows how easily bylined content can slip into respected outlets carrying no evidence the author is who they claim to be, which affects brand safety, editorial trust and the value of earned media placements. Two publications, Hacker Noon and Information Age, have already removed articles once the questions were raised, and the case adds to a widening dispute over how public relations firms serving the cryptocurrency sector generate coverage.

A second wave of unverifiable bylines

Rob Waugh, the reporter behind both investigations, wrote that Press Gazette had raised questions about four more prolific finance journalists who have so far been unable to verify their identities and have written for a number of well known journalism brands. The reporting, published on September 3, 2026, follows an earlier Press Gazette investigation into four other finance journalists who together published more than 1,000 articles and who, three months on, have not come forward to verify that they exist.

The pattern connecting both rounds of reporting is consistent. The questionable freelancers have a history of writing positive stories about cryptocurrency launches, and several appear linked to prominent public relations firms serving the blockchain industry, named as Inbound Junction and MarketAcross. The four writers named in the newer investigation had appeared in publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Information Age and The Next Web.

Press Gazette said it asked the publications that had carried the writers' work to verify their credentials, and none of them could. All four were described as having thin online profiles and few ways to be contacted. After Press Gazette made contact, Hacker Noon and Information Age removed articles credited to the writers in question.

The four names under scrutiny

Sadie Ann Williamson is described in the reporting as having had dozens of pieces published online, including in Entrepreneur, Hackernoon, IB Times, Venturebeat and Information Age. She presents herself as a blockchain expert running a company called Williamson Fintech Consulting, based in New Zealand. According to the investigation, the firm's listed address on Quay Street sits in a retail area, and no company of that name appears in Google Maps. Despite repeated contact attempts, Press Gazette said no one at Williamson Fintech Consulting had replied.

Williamson's LinkedIn page claims she worked for Deloitte in both Sydney and Auckland, but Deloitte's press office told Press Gazette there was no record of anyone of that name ever having worked there. A further claim, that she had coached for years at Auckland's Ponsonby Rugby Club, was also checked; the club told Press Gazette it had no record of anyone by that name. Press Gazette said it contacted the publications that had published Williamson's work and asked them to verify her existence, and that none had done so.

The investigation also connects Williamson to a public relations campaign. She was cited by the Israeli public relations firm Inbound Junction as an example of what the agency called earned media, in a piece featuring the agency's client Akeyless in Information Age. According to Press Gazette, Inbound Junction said her coverage was part of a public relations campaign that generated 117 articles and three million impressions.

Ralph Tkatchuk is described as another unusual business expert with a thin online profile, likewise cited by Inbound Junction as earned media in coverage promoting the agency's client Memcyco. Tkatchuk has written for Entrepreneur, CIO, Builtin and other publications, and maintains an active presence on LinkedIn and X, according to the reporting. Press Gazette said Tkatchuk had not responded to multiple attempts to reach him through LinkedIn or Twitter, and that his profile appeared to be automated. His profile photograph, the investigation adds, bears a striking resemblance to a different IT professional, also named Ralph, an American who offers domestic computer repair services; Press Gazette said it was not naming that individual out of privacy concerns and that it was unclear whether he had consented to his image being used in this way.

A now-removed article on the website CIO showed Tkatchuk promoting the Gladius crypto coin, still visible through the Wayback Machine, according to Press Gazette. Gladius is described in the reporting as an enormously controversial crypto startup that collapsed in 2017, having raised 12.7 million dollars through an initial coin offering before investors lost their money. Nadav Dakner of MarketAcross, also linked to Inbound Junction, is named in the reporting as the marketing and public relations partner for Gladius, and was also said to be an investor. Press Gazette reported that the token never launched and that investors were never refunded, despite pressure from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

Victor G Snyder is named as another widely quoted finance commentator, claiming to work for an organisation called Boss Makers, whose stated mission, according to the reporting, is "empowering entrepreneurs to filter out the noise, achieve flow and tackle the challenges that will get them where they want to be - ultimately, to own success." Snyder's financial commentary has appeared dozens of times in Entrepreneur, CEO World, Forbes, Small Biz Trends, Inc 42 and other outlets, Press Gazette said. Despite Boss Makers having reportedly operated for ten years, the investigation found it has just nine followers on X, and that Snyder's LinkedIn profile has been deleted. The Boss Makers website itself has been taken down, though it remains visible via the Wayback Machine.

Press Gazette said it had contacted the publications that had featured Snyder, and that some were investigating his profile, though none had been able to verify him or connect Press Gazette with him at the time of writing. Snyder has not responded to emails sent through the Boss Makers site, according to the reporting, and, like Tkatchuk, his X account appears to be based in Israel rather than the United States, even though the Boss Makers site lists his location as Florida.

The fourth name is Daan Pepijn, described as a freelance tech writer who has been inactive for some time but previously contributed to The Next Web and other outlets. Press Gazette said his LinkedIn account is based in Israel and that he had not responded to a request for verification after four weeks. In 2017, according to the investigation, Pepijn wrote in support of the Gladius coin, describing it in published text as a decentralized network for distributed denial of service protection and content delivery that sought to disrupt the existing industry of cloud based providers.

What the named agencies said

Press Gazette said it contacted Nadav Dakner, Elad Mor, Inbound Junction and MarketAcross by email. According to the reporting, MarketAcross managing partner Itai Elizur responded on the record. Elizur said InboundJunction works with hundreds of clients and thousands of contacts across news agencies, media brokers and third party providers and platforms, naming Haro and Whitepress as examples. He said the firm does not employ journalists and that its employees do not operate any of the profiles Press Gazette had referenced. He added that the company does not hold personal contact details for the individuals named and that any activity associated with them appeared to date back years.

Elizur also told Press Gazette that two former InboundJunction employees are currently the subject of ongoing civil proceedings brought by the company, which include allegations of breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and fraud, and said that litigation is a matter of public record. He said that to the extent any information reaching Press Gazette had originated, directly or indirectly, from those former employees, he was asking the publication to weigh that context when considering their reliability and motivations.

The earlier investigation set the pattern

Press Gazette's first report on the topic, published on May 12, 2026 and updated the following day, established the shape that the September follow up would repeat. That earlier piece identified four prolific financial journalists covering cryptocurrency who had, according to the reporting, ignored repeated requests to verify their identities, together accounting for more than 1,000 articles across more than 30 different news outlets. Press Gazette said at the time that none of the many publications that had run their work had been able to verify them either, despite being asked to do so.

The four writers named in that first investigation, Joe Liebkind, Luis Aureliano, Nikolai Kuznetsov and Reuben Jackson, carried professional profiles describing them as a freelance technology journalist based in Berlin, a byline appearing under an outlet called CryptoCoinsNews, a financial analyst and trader based in Tel Aviv, and a blockchain security specialist and contributing crypto writer based in New York, respectively, according to social profile details reproduced in the reporting.

Why the pattern recurs

Taken together, the two investigations describe a recurring set of markers: professional headshots, moderately detailed biographies, bylines distributed across a wide spread of reputable outlets, and, upon closer inspection, addresses, employers or professional memberships that do not check out. The connective tissue in both rounds of reporting is a link to public relations agencies serving blockchain and cryptocurrency clients, and a track record of favorable coverage timed around token launches, several of which later failed or were characterized in the reporting as having collapsed.

This is not a story about a technology platform or an advertising product. It concerns the supply of editorial content itself, the raw material that earned media campaigns are built on, and the difficulty, even for experienced editors at established outlets, of confirming that a byline attached to a published article belongs to an identifiable person.

Context for advertising and publishing professionals

PPC Land's own reporting has tracked a parallel and related problem on the technical side of this issue: the rise of what researchers call pink slime, sites that mimic the format of local news outlets while carrying undisclosed ownership and fabricated or absent bylines. That reporting draws on work from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and NewsGuard, and documents how the phenomenon has evolved from politically motivated content networks toward AI-native publishing operations. One recent example detailed in that reporting, Prism Media, launched more than 200 AI generated local news publications in the United States on May 26, 2026 before suspending the network roughly three months later, following investigative reporting from Interlochen Public Radio that found the sites summarized and distorted local reporting under fabricated bylines.

The Press Gazette cases differ in an important respect. They do not concern AI generated text appearing under invented names on invented outlets. They concern individual bylines, apparently representing real people, appearing on real and long established publications, including titles as prominent as Forbes and Entrepreneur. The verification failure sits with the writer's identity rather than with the publishing venue or the production method. That distinction matters for anyone assessing where editorial risk actually concentrates: it is not confined to obscure or newly created websites.

The commercial mechanism linking the two Press Gazette investigations to broader industry concerns is the earned media placement itself. According to the reporting, Inbound Junction described coverage generated through Sadie Ann Williamson's byline as having produced 117 articles and three million impressions for a single client campaign. That framing echoes how digital public relations agencies commonly report results to clients, treating volume of placements and estimated impressions as the primary success metrics, independent of whether the platform carrying those placements can confirm who wrote them.

PPC Land has also reported extensively on the broader quality problem facing programmatic and editorial supply, including research from Integral Ad Science estimating close to 10 billion dollars in annual advertiser waste on made for advertising inventory, and separate IAB Australia guidance formalizing how such sites are defined for the industry. Those frameworks address inventory built to generate impressions rather than readership. The Press Gazette cases point to an adjacent but distinct failure mode: legitimate, high traffic publications carrying content from writers whose existence cannot be confirmed, which is a reputational and editorial integrity question rather than strictly an ad fraud or inventory quality question, though the two categories can intersect where campaigns are measured by placement counts rather than by verified authorship.

Brand safety and suitability vendors, including Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, classify inventory using taxonomies built around content characteristics and site level signals. Neither category, as PPC Land's reporting on brand safety mechanics has described, currently addresses whether an individual byline corresponds to a real, identifiable author. That gap sits below the level at which most current verification tooling operates, whether the tooling in question governs advertising placement or editorial trust.

The wider financial history behind the names

The Gladius case referenced in connection with both Ralph Tkatchuk and Daan Pepijn provides a concrete illustration of the stakes involved when favorable early coverage accompanies a token launch. According to the Press Gazette investigation, Gladius raised 12.7 million dollars through an initial coin offering, and the token never launched, leaving investors without a refund despite pressure from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Nadav Dakner, named as MarketAcross's marketing and public relations partner for the project, was also said to be an investor in it. That combination, positive editorial coverage from writers with unverifiable identities, distributed through outlets with genuine reach, tied to a since collapsed token, is presented in the reporting as characteristic of the broader pattern rather than an isolated incident.

Timeline

  • 2017: Daan Pepijn publishes commentary promoting the Gladius cryptocurrency token, according to Press Gazette's reporting
  • June 28, 2017: Gladius, having raised 12.7 million dollars through an initial coin offering, fails to launch and investors are not refunded, per the investigation
  • May 12, 2026: Press Gazette publishes its first investigation, identifying four finance and crypto writers, Joe Liebkind, Luis Aureliano, Nikolai Kuznetsov and Reuben Jackson, whose existence could not be verified across more than 1,000 articles and over 30 outlets
  • May 13, 2026: Press Gazette updates the first investigation
  • September 3, 2026: Press Gazette publishes a second investigation naming four additional writers, Sadie Ann Williamson, Ralph Tkatchuk, Victor G Snyder and Daan Pepijn, prompting Hacker Noon and Information Age to remove articles credited to them

Summary

Who. Press Gazette, the British media trade publication, and reporter Rob Waugh, investigating four newly identified finance and cryptocurrency writers: Sadie Ann Williamson, Ralph Tkatchuk, Victor G Snyder and Daan Pepijn. The investigation also involves the publications that carried their bylines, including Forbes, Entrepreneur, CIO, Information Age, The Next Web and Hacker Noon, and the public relations firms Inbound Junction and MarketAcross, named in connection with several of the writers.

What. Press Gazette reported that it could not verify the four writers exist as identifiable people, citing unreachable contacts, unverifiable employers and professional affiliations, and thin or automated seeming online profiles. Two publications, Hacker Noon and Information Age, removed articles credited to the writers after being contacted.

When. The follow up investigation was published on September 3, 2026, three months after Press Gazette's first report on the same pattern, published May 12, 2026 and updated May 13, 2026.

Where. The writers' claimed locations span New Zealand, the United States and Florida specifically, while several of their social media accounts are, according to the reporting, based in Israel. The public relations firms named, Inbound Junction and MarketAcross, are described as serving the global blockchain industry.

Why. For marketers, publishers and agency practitioners, the case demonstrates that earned media placements and bylined commentary in reputable outlets can originate from writers whose identity cannot be confirmed, a gap that sits outside current brand safety and made-for-advertising classification systems, which address inventory and content characteristics rather than the verifiability of an individual author.