GoKawiilA few weeks ago, I wrote about a rising and extremely prolific marketing scam that I’ve been able to trace back to operators in Nigeria.
Using highly personalized (AI-generated) email solicitations that make it seem the sender (always with a Gmail address, always presenting as a marketing or PR expert) has really read the book, the scammer offers marketing services of various kinds, usually for a not-exorbitant fee of a few hundred dollars. If the author bites, they’re referred to a Nigerian “assistant” or “payment processor” on Upwork or Fiverr for payment. The scammer then demands access to the author’s KDP account.
I’ve since discovered two new and distinct iterations of this scam–both of which, like the first one, have appeared abruptly and spun up very fast.
Fake Book Clubs/Book Club Impersonations
Just in the last two weeks, I’ve heard from nearly two dozen writers who’ve received emails purportedly from local book clubs, offering features or spotlights for the writers’ books.
In some cases, as the example below, the book club appears to be fictional, with no trace of it to be found online. (I’ve redacted not just the author’s name and title of the book, but the personal details mentioned in the fourth paragraph.) Notice how sloppy this is: the club has one name at the beginning of the message, and another in the signature.
In other cases, the book club is real, with a presence on Meetup.com–as in this shorter and less personalized (and more authentic-seeming) email supposedly from Mocha Girls Read (a real representative of Mocha Girls Read has confirmed that this is an impersonation of both the club and the organizer):
The catch, as you’ll doubtless have guessed, is that the author has to pay a fee for their appearance, variously described as a “spot fee” or a “spotlight fee” or a “spot-securing fee” or a “participation fee”. (Needless to say, real book clubs don’t charge fees to their guests). 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.
Payment options also vary, with some scammers encouraging payment via the friends and family option on Paypal (scammers like this option because the payments can’t be reversed). Others offer to send invoices. As appears to be typical of Nigerian writing scams, the invoice arrives in the form of an Upwork contract from a third party–like this one, presented to the writer who received the first solicitation above:
Here’s Olaleye Abdulhammed’s profile:
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