How to idenfiy scammers

Scammers are getting ever more sophisticated

Scammers are getting ever more sophisticated these days. Now they come up with excellent imitations of agencies and publishing companies to try to suck money out of authors and writers. I’ve witnessed two of these scams recently. One used at the names of an agency and one of its executives to try and get me to bite. The second used a similar ploy using a publishing company and the name of its acquisition editor, In both cases if you searched for the agency/publisher name and the person, you’d get responses that said both company and person are the real deal.

The tip off that you received a scam is the email address used. Typically, the address is from Gmail or AOL and companies don't use commercial emails accounts. They have their own internal email servers.

This is the email I received from an “agency” (I removed the person’s name): name.agency.book.film@gmail.com. the email said “name” was a member of the Pontas Agency. The legitimate business email for this guy is name@pontas.com. Notice the differences in addresses.

For the publishing company, I received an email from  skyhorse.publishing@aol.com. The email said it was from the acquisition manager and gave her name. A search reveled the publishing company is real and so is the name of acquisition manager. But Skyhorse publishing does not have a public email address. If it did, it would look like name@skyhorse.com

It should be noted that the initial emails contain very realistic imitations of the cooperate logos.