Fake film deals and emails from top agents: who is behind the explosion in literary scams?

Writers are being bombarded daily with invitations from fake book groups and offers to publicise their work. For the scamming industry, aspiring authors can be a soft touch This piece first appeared in the Dial

‘Hello Professor Snigdha Poonam,” the email began. I read that again. Nobody has ever called me “professor” for the obvious reason that I am not a professor. Bracing myself, I read on. The email was from Timothy Firth, organiser of a Seattle-based life-drawing community with 1,943 members that regularly has “thoughtful discussions inspired by creative works”. A recent inspiration was my first book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World. The group wanted to discuss it, the email said, at one of its upcoming meetups. Attendees would be encouraged to post reviews on Goodreads and Amazon after.

I looked up CAM Life Drawing and found an events page and an Instagram account. The latter had some photos of Timothy Firth – white, male – as well as testimonials from members who said he worked “day and night to create more community space”. Something told me this wasn’t the man who had reached out to me.

Why would a hyperlocal life-drawing community in Seattle be interested in a nonfiction book about the shifting aspirations of young people in India’s small towns? The book was published seven years ago. What did they want from me?

I accepted the invitation. The next email had a slick poster promoting the Zoom event, with the book cover as the backdrop and blurbs from the Economist and other publications. My attention was drawn to something more intriguing: a request for a “contribution fee”, with no amount specified. It would cover promotion, coordination and administration. But, oddly, this email didn’t come from Timothy. Signing off this time was Stephen – “Organiser, Community Improv LA”, which was another group in another city. According to the improv community’s Facebook group, Stephen is indeed the name of the organiser. However, Stephen had written to me using Timothy’s email address. To add to the chaos, Stephen/Timothy had also left what I suspect was an AI prompt in the email, which included the line: “MAKE IT MORE PROFESSIONAL.”

This was undoubtedly a scam. Genuine book clubs don’t ask for money from authors. But who was behind it?

Had these individuals actually read my work, they would have wanted to stay away from me. I have spent the last 10 years reporting on transnational fraud. My first book, Dreamers, closed with a chapter on fake call centres in India; my second, Scamlands, travelled to other low-income countries in Asia to portray an invisible empire that thrives on inequality, technological change and the erosion of trust.

Along the way, I met and interviewed the scammers whose labour keeps this empire running. For some, fraud was a route to upward mobility; for others, an act of revenge against the privileged. Though I have formally emerged from this underworld, I can never delete a scam email without wanting to know more.

I agreed to pay the book club – but after rather than before the event. After clarifying that “Stephen” was a typing error, “Timothy” sent me a Google Meet link for the book discussion. I joined the meeting to find about 20 people already in there: Alexander, Andrew, Mira, Rajnish, another Alexander, and several others. Timothy was also there and so was Stephen. None of them had their cameras on. Going by the profile pictures they used, most of them appeared to be white.

“Professor, what was your inspiration for writing Dreamers?”

“Professor, what did you learn while reporting from Indian small towns?”

While the questions may have been AI-generated, the voices seemed human. They did not always align with their pictures. Timothy seemed to be a woman, not a man, judging by the voice. Who were these people? They left only one clue. All these ostensibly white people, men and women, spoke with a west African accent.

I am not the only author to have found myself stuck in a Zoom book club with fake readers. Countless writers with published books have been receiving invitations from reading communities that start to unravel after a basic Google search.

As often happens with scams, most invitations sound too good to be true – thousands of members, incredible Goodreads clout and, at times, something even more alluring for an author: a deep understanding of their book.

Many authors spot red flags from the first email onward, but not all.

One author who engaged with a book-club impersonator was told a $100 (£75) contribution for the online event would cover snacks for the participants; she withdrew without asking how they would partake of the snacks while on Zoom. Novelist Marsh Rose, playing along, exchanged 29 emails with the Chicago LGBTQ Book Club. “The individuals whose voices I heard on the Zoom didn’t seem to be speaking from Chicago. They all sounded like my friend in Nigeria,” she wrote in a blog post for WritersWeekly.com, an online resource for authors that offers writing opportunities and industry news.

Writers are also being bombarded with offers to publish our next book, market our book, handle social media for us, represent us as agents and get us book-to-movie deals with Netflix and Paramount. Every major publisher, agent, editor, author union and literary award executive is at risk of being impersonated.

The money requested often seems small. “Amounts reported to me range from $55 to $350. In one case, the scammer offered three ‘spotlight packages’ – basic, essential and premium – for between $100 and $200,” Victoria Strauss, co-founder of Writer Beware, an anti-scam watchdog, wrote in a blog post. Often, the paper trail leads to Nigerian third parties holding bank accounts in the US. Author Jon Cocks paid $478.65 to one “Mary Brown,” who claimed a wide network of book clubs across the US, the UK and Australia, only to later notice the name Dayo Oguntuase listed as the recipient on the PayPal statement.

The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) reports “an explosion” in the number of members seeking advice about unusually enticing offers in recent months. “Even the most vigilant of writers are understandably falling prey to these scams,” WGGB’s general secretary, Ellie Piers, said in a statement commenting on new guidance, co-issued with the Society of Authors in May, to help authors protect themselves against scammers. “Our advisory team receives at least a dozen reports of scams each week,” Anna Ganley, chief executive of the Society of Authors, said in her own statement, tracing the spike to the emergence of generative AI. The US Authors Guild says it hears from authors who have been scammed, or nearly scammed, every day. Angela Hoy, the founder of WritersWeekly.com, told me she is in touch with “authors all day long, every day, thinking they got an offer from one of the top five publishers in New York or thinking they’ve been contacted by a famous literary agent”.

A prominent trendsetter was the PageTurner scam, named after a fictitious US-registered publishing company that operated between 2017 and 2024. Call centre staff in Cebu, the Philippines, claimed PageTurner was an intermediary between authors and literary agents, film studios and streaming services and persuaded authors to pay so-called taxes, transaction fees and other costs before their books could be published or adapted.

The scale of the operation became clear after US authorities launched an investigation into the business. According to the Department of Justice, more than 800 authors were defrauded of upwards of $48m (£36m). Writer Beware received hundreds of complaints about PageTurner. One author reportedly lost more than $600,000 (£450,000). The prosecutors found that at least $42m in proceeds were laundered through accounts in the Philippines. One defendant pleaded guilty in May of this year, while three others are awaiting trial.

Judging by the surge in both the number and range of baits used on authors over the past couple of years, the scams seem to be launched from multiple territories. Anyone who has researched publishing would know most authors don’t have bundles of cash lying around. So why are the scammers coming after us?

Hoy, who has dealt with thousands of writers at WritersWeekly.com, puts it down to ego. Brian Whiddon, the site’s managing editor, elaborated: “Not every author is a narcissist, but they all want to be recognised. That’s exactly what these scammers are targeting. They have identified a very, very lucrative niche.”

Writers are waiting “for somebody to read their writing”, Hoy added. She argued that is why many writers believe the praise scammers heap on them. AI makes many of the compliments sound nuanced and personalised. Elderly authors are particularly vulnerable. As Hoy explained, a significant number of people who have a book in them leave off the writing until they have retired. Something else also kicks into the picture at this life stage: a sizable retirement fund. Scammers know American people have worked their whole lives and have retirement accounts, Hoy said.

Some authors are so hell-bent on signing up for the deals the scammers promise that they disregard Hoy’s counsel. Others come to Hoy when it’s too late. She has said one of the writers in her community paid more than $100,000 for a fake book-to-movie deal.

“I’ve actually used some of the verbiage from these emails talking about how fantastic my book is in my advertising,” author Donna Strong commented in the Goodreads discussion forum Readers Group Scams.

Even as a new category of literary scams emerges every few days, authors have very little information about the people behind them.

In August, Danny de Hek, a New Zealand-based scam buster, forwarded me an Excel spreadsheet he received from a scammer in Karachi, Pakistan, with permission from the sender. Titled “LinkedIn Outreach 2026”, it has monthly data on targeted authors from March until August. One sheet has 403 names, each neatly labelled: new author, cookbook author, religious author, investigative author, poetry author, New York Times bestselling author and so on. Most are based in the US; the rest are in Canada, Australia or Europe.

It’s an incredibly detailed document, with columns for the name of the person who found the profile, the person who first reached out, the service the author needs (website development, illustrator, social media visibility), the department handling the author, meeting links shared with the author. In a few cases, the document also lists the outcome of the outreach.

“Not willing to pay, has been scammed before.”

“Meeting booked Wed 12 Aug, 10pm PKT, number confirmed, deep trust-built relationship, ready to invest, needs custom package built around limited budget and multi-project scope.”

Some of the details only make sense if you know the context. 10pm PKT would mean 10am on the US west coast and 1pm in the east. Danny told me that most of the people working on this scam are Pakistani, yet the names of the callers are all American-sounding – Ashley, Jocelyn, Megan – probably to fool the authors into thinking they are Americans working for US-based companies and groups.

Scam recipients often find the emails they receive haphazard and random. But the modern scam industry is a highly organised system modelled on the global corporate setup, with clearly laid out deliverables, salaries, incentives and reporting structures. Even though the schemes are mind-boggling in range, the young people joining these “companies” are given the same targets: Americans on top, followed by gullible foreigners in other western countries. I spent several years reporting from India on its massive scam call-centre network, which employs hundreds of thousands of educated young people trying to beat the dim economic prospects offered by the domestic labour market. Similar Excel spreadsheets are used to organise schemes where Indian scammers in Delhi or Kolkata impersonate Microsoft tech support, the Internal Revenue Service or even the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

De Hek, who exposes transnational scams on his blog and YouTube channel with relentless zeal, told me Pakistan’s fake companies offering literary services operate in a similar fashion to India’s scam call centres. The majority of them maintain physical offices in Karachi and Lahore and employ people aged 20 to 24. Upon joining, the young employees typically get assigned to a unit, each designed around a specific literary swindle. While entry-level employees may only be tasked with outreach, the more experienced ones are entrusted with building long-term relationships aimed at selling multiple “packages” to clients over months and sometimes years.

The most profitable service targets authors lurking outside the notoriously gatekept realm of traditional publishing. Rather than through a cold call or email, the scammers lure them through websites offering self-publishing or vanity publishing.

Scam companies in Pakistan trap writers by impersonating known publishing houses and paying thousands of dollars to influence search results on Google. As a result, someone with a finished manuscript who searches online may find sites such as penguinwriters.com or amazonglobalpublishers.com before any legitimate self-publishing platform. Unlike traditional publishing websites, these feature open calls for new writers. WritersWeekly.com estimates there are at least 3,000 such sites. The biggest tell: a chat box pops up in the bottom right of all fake publishing websites as soon as the page opens, followed by a message from someone with an American-sounding name (such as Mark Anderson or Jessica Parker) and a white person’s face: “How can I help you today?” “Talk to a live agent, not a bot!” claims a ticker. And that much is absolutely true: the person messaging you is a scammer whose shift is dictated by the waking hours in your time zone.

None of the five major trade publishers has sued alleged impersonators. The only recorded instance involves Amazon, which took nearly 20 individuals and associated companies to court in California for falsely claiming affiliation with Amazon Publishing and Kindle Direct Publishing to deceive authors. Amazon won $36.4m (£27m) in February 2025.

M L Stark, a Danish self-published author of several psychological thrillers, is one of the rare victims who has met – and confronted – her scammer in person. Last year, she flew to Thailand to meet with Ethan Williams, a man she believed had become her longtime editor at an LA-based self-publishing house affiliated with Amazon – and a close friend. By this time, she had been talking to him over Zoom and email for more than a year and paid his company about $100,000 for different author services, from editing and cover design to coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

While most of the services she paid for never materialised, the company did follow through on some. They signed her up on IngramSpark, a self-publishing platform, which enabled her to release two books, and Amazon, which made the books available on the platform. Most notably, in 2024, one of her titles was displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square.

“I had paid $10,000 for that,” she told me. Only later, she told me, did she come to see these deliveries as strategic concessions, held back for moments when a long-term client reached the end of her tether. “Each time, it happened when I told them, after months of them stalling, that I wanted my money back.”

The scammers’ last pitch was a Netflix adaptation that they claimed the film-makers wanted to shoot in Thailand – an important setting in her upcoming book, a thriller based on her own life. Stark and Williams were meeting in Thailand to scout locations.

He had told her he was a British citizen, half English and half Arab; as a light-skinned Pakistani, his story was plausible. “He is an artist, he knew how to play the role,” she said. Still, she asked him to show an ID. He produced one that looked clearly faked. “I demanded he show me his passport,” she said. That exposed his real name and citizenship. He came clean. “He said, ‘Yeah, this has been a scam from the beginning. Even Peter is using a fake name; even Ronald is using a fake name. Everybody in the company that you have talked to is a scammer. It’s a huge scam operation, and we are not based in Los Angeles. We are based in Karachi.’” She is still processing her shock.

I clicked on a random website from a list of known scam sites; it happened to be impersonating Red Rock, a real literary agency based in London whose authors have been published by major publishers such as Hurst, which published my first book in the UK. Bold promises greeted me on the homepage.

“Bring your book and brand on Broadway.”

“Join our authors making their mark in Manhattan.”

A chat window opened, and someone with the username “Rae Donnaelly” asked how she could help. I told her I had an idea for a book. She asked for my contact, then called me on WhatsApp from a US number. She spoke like a South Asian imitating an American accent, something I could easily recognise because I’m South Asian myself, and we’ve all tried it at one point or another.

I told her the truth: I was writing an article about author-baiting scams, and I was hoping she could tell me about her experience working for a fake publishing house.

She told me she wasn’t “authorised” to talk about the company she works for, and she refused to tell me her real name. But she had no qualms spilling the beans on her ex-employer.

Rae has a law degree but found it difficult to find a job in law after university. Her first job after graduating was at a fake publishing company in Karachi. “I started working for a company which was a scam – a guaranteed scam – and I didn’t know it when I started off with them. I was an intern trying to learn how the system really works; what the pros and cons are.”

It took Rae only a few days to figure out the company’s business model: proxy sales. They would tell the author they would get them a guaranteed sale order for 1,000 copies, or something like that, making “fake commitments”. The scam rarely stopped there. After a client signed up for developmental editing, they would be offered a discount on book-cover design, and once they paid for that, the scammer would dangle social media management. “It could start off from as little as $400- $500, and it could go up to the skies, like $10,000, $15,000.”

As with all scams, those executing the con learned how easily people can be manipulated if you know what they desired. “You could see how the human brain works. It’s actually scary when you think about it,” Rae admitted.

She believes Americans make easy scam targets. “People in the US are very nice, they’re very good-hearted people. They trust you. Whatever you’re saying, they trust you. That’s the problem.”

At times, the clients only noticed they had been scammed after they had paid all the way up to a Times Square display and Broadway adaptation. “When the authors did not see results, they would either reverse the charge on their card or accuse us of being scamsters,” Rae recalled.

According to Talal Choudhary, an Islamabad-based tech journalist, there are about 1,000 Pakistani companies running scam sites. “One company runs as many as 25 websites. I personally know a company that had about 200 employees, just offering services to writers.” These companies are “very, very profitable”, he said. “From one client, you can make $60,000.”

In Pakistan, Choudhary told me, the workforce of the author-baiting scams is largely made up of high-school and university graduates. They earn an average salary of about 50,000 Pakistani rupees (£136) a month. For high performers, there is commission. For every sale worth $1,000, they might get a 10-20% commission, he said, upselling until the author backs out.