A novelist writing in The Guardian says near-daily, AI-written fan emails are trying to con authors out of a few hundred dollars each by promising book-club promotion, and that when he followed one offer to its source it led to a postal address in the Philippines. The piece, published Sunday, is a first-person account rather than an investigation, but it names a pattern that working writers will recognise in their own inboxes.
The emails, the novelist writes, arrive from well-informed readers in Barcelona and Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw, with appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton. Some praise what he calls the deadpan genius of his novels; others admire his nonfiction’s moral courage. All of them, he writes, are fake, and they promise to promote his work at city-wide book clubs or among reading communities if he transfers a few hundred dollars to cover costs.
Most writers he knows receive a steady stream of these messages, he writes, often sophisticated enough to bypass spam filters. His own test for spotting them: a real fan would not have read all his books.
Why the scams read like real readers
The novelist’s explanation is that the tools behind the messages have read the books. He cites Anthropic’s agreement last year to pay $1.5bn in compensation to thousands of authors whose copyrighted work was used to train its AI, Claude, and a lawsuit filed in July by a group of publishers against Google over the use of copyrighted material to train Gemini. When writers receive AI-assisted scam messages, he writes, they know they are being manipulated by a version of themselves.
He describes one exchange with a supposed Ottessa Moshfegh, the bestselling, Booker-shortlisted author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The fake Moshfegh answered a question about her work-in-progress with a paragraph on interior life and how emotions register, then said the best way to understand her work was to explore her Amazon page. Other writers, he writes, have received messages from fake Donna Tartt and fake Sally Rooney.
Following one offer as far as it goes
Rather than simply report and block, the novelist replied to the founder of something calling itself the Berlin Book Club. He said he did need help reaching new audiences and was willing to pay for connections. The founder asked for CashApp or a direct bank transfer; he insisted he could only send cash, and said he had 500 US dollars in notes in an unmarked envelope and lived near a post office.
She eventually gave him a physical address. Neither of them, he writes, commented on how unusual it was for the founder of the Berlin Book Club to have a postal address in the Philippines. He found the street on Google Maps: a rural two-lane road with palm trees, a junk shop, an evangelical church and a large building behind high white walls.
He did not send the cash. He shared the details with the country’s cybercrime agency.
The industry behind the inbox
The novelist places that address in the context of industrial-scale “scam farms” in the Philippines and neighbouring Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. He describes last year’s raid on a facility in Bamban, north of Manila, where nearly 700 people were freed after being trapped and forced to work as scammers, and writes that the compound was being run by the local mayor, Alice Guo.
He also quotes Winston Casio, spokesman for the presidential anti-organised crime commission in the Philippines, on why enforcement is difficult: the criminals have, in Casio’s words, “the financial capability to corrupt just about anybody in public office. The amount of money they have is their potent tool against law enforcement.”
Scammers, the novelist writes, are encouraged to use generative AI and face-masking apps, and he describes compounds found with sets, costumes and wigs for staging different frauds. One former compound manager, interviewed by the BBC, described the work in terms a novelist would recognise: “You create a dream,” he said, describing it as all about exploiting emotion.
For authors, the practical advice in the piece is the boring kind. Scam fan mail only asks for money and often claims to have read everything. Reporting and blocking costs nothing, and it is the response the novelist recommends, even as he admits to a fantasy of unmasking the sender.
The other side of that screen, he writes, is likely someone frightened and far from home, working phones in a sound-insulated booth while a manager walks past with a taser at his hip.
Separately, Literary Hub’s November science fiction and fantasy roundup published Monday lists twelve titles arriving this month, including Curtis C. Chen’s Kangaroo Forth and Ry Herman’s This Knight Topples Empires, both out November 3.
Sources
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