I regret that his happened to you, Justine. I can't tell from this piece, but by now you probably know that Allison Wiltz the writer had nothing to do with the scam; scammers created accounts with her likeness expecting you to do exactly what you did and be deceived. I get the same requests from scammers posing as the writer Y.L. Wolfe about every week. However, the fake accounts will have 19 followers or so, not 47K.

I don't know how Medium can prevent this from happening, but it does seem that they remove them as soon as they are reported as spam.

Again, so sorry you had this awful experience.