Wasted $150 on a subscription to a so-called "independent news archive" that was just reposting Wikipedia

I signed up for this site called Global Underground Press last fall after seeing it shared in a few forums. Paid $150 for a year access thinking I'd get rare zines and censored pamphlets from places like Myanmar and Iran. Turns out half their PDFs were just screenshots of Wikipedia articles with the URLs cropped out. I found one "exclusive" document that I recognized from a public library archive I visited back in 2019. Emailed their support twice and never got a reply. Anyone else run into a scam like this pushing recycled content as original? Feels like these folks are cashing in on people who genuinely want to support independent media.

2 comments

2 Comments

claire6428d agoMost Upvoted

I read a report from the Tow Center last year that found something like 40% of these "independent archive" sites are just recycling free content with a paid subscription layer. Reminds me of that whole thing with the "Hidden History" newsletter that got busted in 2022 for scraping Wikipedia and charging $20 a month for the same articles (I think they had like 2,000 subscribers before someone exposed them). It's a real shame because people like me who want to find genuine underground press from places with censorship get burned by these grifters. I actually saw Global Underground Press mentioned on a subreddit about banned books a few months ago, but the mods there warned it was probably a scam. Sorry you got caught by them, it's really frustrating when something that sounds promising turns out to be total trash.

robin_wright28d ago

Filed a chargeback with my credit card company right after I realized, that's the only way I got my money back actually. Took a few weeks but they sided with me since I had screenshots of the stolen content and the ignored emails (my bank's fraud department was surprisingly helpful). Now I only subscribe to places that let me preview actual full pages before paying, and I always cross-check a sample against Google Images or archive.org first.