The explosive e-mail landed in llker Sezer’s inbox just after 9 p.m. on Sept. 2 with the subject line “Investigative feature submission. Canada-based criminal network with a Turkey trail.”
The story sounded like a huge scoop for Mr. Sezer and his staff of 30 journalists at Türkiye Today, an English-language news website based in Istanbul.
The e-mail was from Daniel Robson, who said he was an independent Canadian journalist specializing in “extremism, terrorism, foreign interference, and transnational cyber-enabled crime.” He listed several articles he’d written for a variety of Canadian news outlets.
“It was very exciting,” Mr. Sezer said in an interview Tuesday. “A Moroccan-Canadian drug lord is running money through Turkey. Wow.”
In follow-up e-mails, Mr. Robson “had this sense of urgency to publish the article,” Mr. Sezer added.
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But the editor wanted to do some reporting on the alleged Turkish middleman in the story. He quickly discovered he was a shopkeeper in Istanbul. He needed more proof of the allegations.
“I’m like, ‘Look, I cannot hurt a Turkish citizen. It can put me in legal trouble, also journalistically, it’s just wrong,’” Mr. Sezer told Mr. Robson.
When he asked Mr. Robson for documents to back up the story, he couldn’t come up with much. He also begged off a video or phone call with the editor, claiming he was suffering from complications from dental work.
Mr. Sezer noticed that the e-mails and the article had telltale signs of being AI-generated − “these long, very ChatGPT-ish phrases.” Earlier this year he’d refused to publish several articles that had clearly been written by AI.
He started reaching out to the Canadian news outlets that had published Mr. Robson’s work. He read some of the pieces and found the same hallmarks of AI.
In an article published Tuesday in Türkiye Today, Mr. Sezer said he also noticed that Mr. Robson’s “international focus revealed a coordinated agenda: fiercely defending the Moroccan state while orchestrating targeted information campaigns against its critics.”
He went on to describe how “Canadian newsrooms scrambled to address the breach.”
The Ottawa Citizen, he wrote, promptly deleted Mr. Robson’s biography page and removed his articles without publishing an editorial note.
In a statement published Tuesday evening, editor-in-chief Nicole Feriancek acknowledged that the newspaper had “published an author in the opinion section who, upon further investigation, does not seem to be a real person.”
She said the Citizen began an investigation after being alerted by Mr. Sezer, adding that Mr. Robson would not agree to a phone call or meeting “because of recent emergency dental surgery.”
The Montreal Gazette and four digital publications – the Western Standard, The Hub, Open Canada and Policy Options – also published articles by Daniel Robson.
The earliest was published in July, 2025, by the Gazette, according to a review conducted by The Globe and Mail that identified more than two dozen articles. The latest appeared in the Western Standard in September, 2026.
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That digital outlet, based in Alberta, published roughly 20 articles by Mr. Robson over an 18-month period, according to publisher Derek Fildebrandt and opinion editor Christopher Oldcorn.
It has since removed those articles and published a notice noting that Mr. Robson was “unable to verify his identity.”
The outlet became aware of the questions surrounding Mr. Robson after being contacted by other concerned publications, Mr. Fildebrandt said.
He said the Western Standard had previously rejected several of Mr. Robson’s pitches. “I’m informed that a significant number of what he had submitted was what I would classify as propagandizing for foreign governments,” he said.
Mr. Oldcorn said he had communicated repeatedly with Mr. Robson during the past year, including over the phone. The last time they spoke was in late July or early August, he said, when Mr. Robson explained that he would be unavailable for a few weeks because of upcoming dental surgeries.
“The person I spoke to on the phone … The accent was clearly what you would expect in Ontario," Mr. Oldcorn said. “There was nothing in his voice that would make me think he was Moroccan in any way, shape or form.”
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Mr. Robson also published articles in The Hub, a digital publication focused on policy and economics. The Globe identified six articles published between August, 2025, and March, 2026, all of which have since been removed from the website.
Three Robson articles published by Open Canada, a policy magazine published by the Canadian International Council, were removed Tuesday after a request for comment from The Globe. An unsigned e-mail from Open Canada said the articles were removed because the publication was unable to verify the author’s identity.
The editor-in-chief of the digital magazine Policy Options, Les Perreaux, worked with Mr. Sezer to try to identify the writer.
When he couldn’t find Mr. Robson or verify his work, Mr. Perreaux wrote a lengthy note on the publication’s website last week acknowledging that editors should have been more thorough and that Mr. Robson’s article had been removed from the website.
“My main takeaway in all this is that we have to be really careful,” he told The Globe. “In this case, I relied on a publication history, combined with a very productive and cordial communication on the edit – albeit via e-mail – to put our trust in this guy.”
Someone with the same name who described himself as a journalist specializing in “extremism, national security, and digital threats” pitched two stories to The Globe in the summer of 2025. The Globe declined to publish the pieces. Attempts to contact Mr. Robson Tuesday were not successful.
Mr. Sezer suspects that Moroccan intelligence could have been behind the Robson story pitched to him. The central figure in the alleged drug ring was Hicham Jerando, a Moroccan-Canadian businessman who has been actively criticizing Moroccan officials and institutions online.
Mr. Jerando was not available for comment, but he told Mr. Sezer that Moroccan intelligence regularly targets him because of his opposition to the “corrupt elite” in the country.
Several of the Robson articles published in Canada also praised Morocco’s King Mohammed VI and urged Canada to form a security partnership with the African country.
The Globe identified a link between Morocco and Mr. Robson. According to a digital research tool, Mr. Robson’s e-mail address was used to register a Moroccan Microsoft account in March, 2026. That account was last active in early September, records show.
“So my understanding is that this is probably a Moroccan person building a persona under an Anglo-Saxon name and using AI to produce articles,” Mr. Sezer said.
Morocco is among a handful of countries that signed the Abraham Accords in 2020, an initiative spearheaded by U.S. President Donald Trump to bring some Arab nations closer to Israel. Morocco and Israel have full diplomatic ties and have increased their trade and transportation links. However, those ties have generated fierce opposition in Morocco and much of the Arab world, especially in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Mr. Sezer’s contacts with Canadian media and his questioning of the author somehow got back to Mr. Robson. “He sent me this very, very agitated, very threatening e-mail saying that there will be repercussions because I am putting his life in danger,” Mr. Sezer said.
“I was like, ‘Look, if you want to be a real deal, declare yourself, send everyone your CV, make a video call. I’m going to pull this story. I’m not going to publish anything.’”
He hasn’t heard from him since.