I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems for whatever reason they have given up on SMS spam) from supposedly “cute” girls who he believed were just random young girls randomly sliding in to his DMs (this guy is in his mid-70s for the record).

It ended up that these girls would ask him for money, and he drained his savings accounts giving money to these “girls”, and even after running out of money, he kept believing these girls were real, they wanted to know him as a person, and that they just needed a little money to help out.

Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them. He would briefly relent, delete all his messaging apps these scammers were using to contact him, then he would feel lonely or what not, reinstall the apps, and resume contact with the scammers. It didn’t matter how many times we told him they weren’t real. It didn’t matter how much money he lost from these scammers pitching their wares to him.

He just stubbornly believed these were actual young girls who wanted to be his friend, no matter how many people told him they weren’t real, that he was just setting himself up to be scammed yet again.

I had to break contact with him. It just really angered me that this guy couldn’t believe something as basic as these girls actually being African/Southeast Asian/etc. scammers and not real people wanting to get to know him.

Half my spam folder is currently from the same group of people, with similar sales pitches, though one also promised 25 five star Amazon reviews for $200 which is scary if true. The whole blog post just about sums up an indie writers journey, having to become a reluctant marketing person, and fighting the algorithm for recognition; the meme nailed it.

Luckily I came to realise after my first book that writing was not about the sales (though that was the starting goal), but about finally putting all my ideas into a bunch of characters and having them live the life and fantasies I never could in a world I created. I got an email out of the blue this week from somebody who read my free sci-fi novel and liked it, such small things really makes the journey worth it.

Replying to the first-ever email was really just making the problem worse for the author. Exacerbated by continuing to engage.

One of the great things about SMTP and email is that a spammer can really never be sure whether a person opened or read an email. Many SMTP will silently accept emails and not inform the sender or auto-generate a reject bounce that a recipient's address doesn't even exist. Unless the reader opens an email and loads some active html content, image, 1x1 px pixel, etc, the sender can never know.

When you start responding with hand crafted emails back to a spam farm all you've done is successfully mark your email address as "there is a live human reading this and they will reply" in some spammer's database.

I recognise these scammers. I run a website for a small community group which just has a bit of information about them which has a contact us page with minimal protection. It comes in waves the language is very similar offering SEO and suchlike. I don't allow any of that through to the community because they are mostly non-technical and somebody will no doubt reply.

This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.

This seems to be limited to the English publishing world, at least for now? I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety (I was interviewed on national public radio in France about it) and didn't receive any one of those scam emails. -- Not "few": zero.

> Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong.

What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.

It's sad that there are people who are creative enough to pull this off who choose to participate in petty scams instead of applying their ai and persuasion skills to something more useful.

A trend that’s leading to more victims is the wave of boomer retirements. Every year there are millions of new 60 and 70 somethings with lots of time on their hands, many of them loaded to the gills and keen to write that novel/memoir/children’s book they’ve been thinking about for years. They are seldom aware of publishing industry requirements, and may be easily swayed by convincing email pitches, “authentic” social media personalities, or YouTube scammers.

So wait, what was the trap?

> In writing this article, Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for structure, data organization, and feedback.

yeah, it was quite visible in style (in parts that I bothered to read)

> each one arriving within hours despite my repeated, polite “no thank you” responses

why anyone would respond to spammers, if they recognize them as spammers? And want them to stop spamming?