Authors: New scams using AI–Don’t fall for it!
Independent authors like me are proud of our work, and we crave exposure and validation from an audience. This makes us vulnerable to a legion of scammers and predators out there. I’ve been in the independent publishing business for almost 20 years, and I’ve seen a lot of scams. Today I got an email with a new one, and if you have published a book, I want to warn you.
A screenshot of the email is above.
Key Points:
- The Tulane Book Festival in March is a legitimate, major literary event so the scammer is piggybacking on that.
- In the past, scam emails would be suspiciously vague, with generic language that could be sent to many potential victims. Here, they are obviously using AI to create text highly specific to my work, trying to fool me into thinking that a real person actually read and loved my book.
- Always look at the sender’s email address. In the past, scam emails had wonky email addresses, sometimes with foreign country designations or odd spellings. This one looks totally legit at first glance, BookFestival.Tulane.Info followed by @gmail.com but notice that it’s just a gmail address. If it actually came from Tulane or a major event, the “Tulane” part would be in the domain–AFTER the @ symbol, not before.
- The scammer here still made some rookie mistakes: there is no proper signature line, no proper contact info, and no links to a registration page. They are counting on the unsuspecting author to directly reply to them by email. Clearly the goal is to get the author to surrender a credit card number in order to pay for “registration fee,” and possibly much more.
- A caution regarding links: When in doubt, NEVER click on a link in a strange email. In this case, I went to the internet and searched for the Tulane Book Festival myself. Unsurprisingly, actual author applications closed in September, and there is no fee.
Your own passion for your work will be used against you. Before responding to any unsolicited inquiry like this–whether by email or telephone–ASK another person to vet it for you, preferably another author.
This is one of the many reasons why you should belong to a local writers’ organization. In my area, I belong to Northern California Publishers and Authors as well as the California Writers Club branch.
Be careful out there!
