Hello
I thought I'd share my latest experience with a scammer.
I’m usually very wary of things that are too good to be true and I'm pretty savvy at seeing through anything like vanity publishing, so am annoyed at myself for being slow to catch on to this latest technique. I had an email from claiming to run a virtual book club in Canada. Whenever I get such approaches to my private email address I usually toss them straight into spam. This one seemed different and obviously tailored to make it so.
As you can see she spoke about my novel 'Did You Whisper Back?' as though she’d read it and in glowing terms . That should have been a red flag, but any of us can get caught off guard and be taken in by flattery. We exchanged a couple of emails back and forth, with me asking for more details and she explaining how it all worked etc eg members of the book club encouraged to buy the books. I did look for it online and there was one site showing its existence and previous ‘Spotlight’ sessions, books featured and numbers of attendees etc. (Obviously all part of the scam to make it seem authentic). That’s not to say it doesn’t exist but it doesn’t require a fee or if there’s a fee involved then say so from the outset.
I also asked her how she heard about my book (I had meant to ask her how she got my email) and it’s only when I agreed to her sending me dates to have my book featured in one of the spotlights that she mentioned a small promotional fee. I felt duped then. Of course!
We 're living in an AI age and she could have so easily picked out salient features of my book using AI, having never gone near it.
I replied saying she hadn’t been upfront about the costs and that I would have to pass. (I didn’t bother to ask what ‘small’ meant). I also mentioned that when something seems too good to be true it usually is in my own experience and that I had wondered how she'd got hold of my email.
She got back to me apologetically saying she should have been upfront about the costs and that if I changed my mind she’d still be interested. Then she mentioned the wrong name of my book title in this email! Twice!! Note, The Retreat isn't my book!
But still it didn't stop there! The latest email didn't even call me by my right name. Here, the scammer blatantly slips up and comes out with the same gushing praise about this other author's book. But only this time it's for a different genre: cozy mysteries. Obviously there's some copying and pasting going on. But for someone who seemed to be a savvy scammer, she badly slipped up.
The point of this blog is to warn others. If after 45 years of writing and scam-spotting, I can be (almost) fooled, then others certainly will be too. Or maybe I've still yet to come to terms with the growing sophistication of AI.
How about you? Have you come across similar scams using AI?
Many thanks.
Kate
