AI Boom Unleashes Scammer Onslaught on Authors

It should be obvious to all authors that scamming is a growth field. For that to happen, it must be lucrative and that means authors must be falling for hoaxes and that is regrettable.

In my case, I used to get a few scam emails every week, but that has dramatically risen to a several per day now. Some of them are quite sophisticated. Many of them are identical to others as if they are all using the same AI app and writing identical queries. Or perhaps some master scam site develops new scams and sells them to others. Maybe, it's a subscription service.

Let's's take a look at the scams that are prevalent at the moment.

Book clubs

This is a popular scam these days. The introductory email says the club wants to put your book in front of its members. If you respond, additional emails will inform you that the members love to write reviews and it is customary to 'tip' each reviewer $50.

A curated publication on Medium (whatever that means)

This is another annoying email that always starts off with the identical opening line. "I almost kept scrolling, but something in your writing made me stop—and I’m genuinely glad it did."

There are many others of this ilk that have one commonality: they never mention the title of a book indicating they have only my email address and nothing else.

Agency queries

The scammers are getting increasingly sophisticated in their approach. I got one claiming that a European agency want the film rights for one of my novels. I checked the agency name and the agent name. Both are real. What wasn't real was the email of the "agent" who contacted me: it was a gmail account. If the email came from a real agent, the email would have come from an agency email server, not gmail.

Phony celebrity endorsements.

How thrilling! Stephen King will promote my books for only $100. So will a dozen other best-selling authors. Please! Give me a break. This one isn't even creative. It's dumb.

Get more reviews

This one offers to get you a set number of reviews for a fixed price. Once you sign up for X reviews (and pay), the scammer will take your book description from Amazon, feed it into an AI app and tell it create X reviews. The AI all will happily do that in a few seconds.

Have you come across a new scam? if so, please write a quick description here.

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