I wrote a book about theft and deception – and now AI scams are flooding my inbox | Books

My latest book had been out for less than a month when the emails started to arrive.

One came from “Elena”, with the tantalising subject line, “When history flutters its wings and reveals a crime too beautiful to ignore.” Then followed a long, florid message about how it was “one of those rare true stories that makes you question everything you thought you knew about history, museums, and human obsession”.

What’s more, she said I had written with “prose that feels like chasing a butterfly through time graceful, deliberate, and a little dangerous”.

I don’t know what it says about me that my gut reaction to such gushing praise is suspicion.

There were other red flags. A reverse image search of Elena’s profile picture revealed that this smiling woman dressed in white, raising a coffee cup to the camera, was in fact a widely circulated stock image.

Elena wasn’t my only new fan. “Mary” soon appeared in my inbox, saying that “few projects encapsulate intellectual intrigue, archival richness, and cinematic pacing the way yours does”.

“Lauren”, on the other hand, wanted to discuss my first book, which she said “turned what could’ve been a dry biography into a living, breathing narrative of media warfare”.

But Lauren also brought a veiled warning: “The irony is wild, a journalist whose own book, brimming with truth, power and insight, isn’t echoing loudly enough across readers’ shelves.”

Brutal. I thought Young Rupert had done OK since its publication in 2023. Heck, it had even been pirated by the LibGen online database – the same dataset infamously used by Meta to train its AI program on millions of authors’ work without permission or compensation. But sure, point taken.

As a journalist I’m used to an inbox filled with spam and cold-call pitches. But these emails seemed tailored to me and my work, despite their language and tone bearing the je-ne-sais-quoi-fakeness of a learning language model.

Authors like me are being targeted by AI-powered accounts promising exposure and fake reviews – even though my book is about theft and fraud.

Lauren even spun a story about a man named “Marcus Hale”, who “lived many years ago and loved inventing things in his little workshop”. Hale, Lauren said, built intricate musical clocks but was outsold by another clockmaker who made louder ones.

Curiously, a few weeks after Lauren and her clunky clock parable, I read a story by my Guardian Australia colleague Kelly Burke about how the indie publishing house Melbourne Books had received calls from authors who had been in contact with an executive named Marcus Hale, from the similarly titled “Melbourne Book Publisher”. But Hale the executive – and, it seems, the clockmaker – don’t appear to exist.

Like the executive Hale, the fake names in my inbox didn’t just come to shower me in praise – they also had a variety of pitches.

Elena claimed to run a 1,200-strong community of “teachers, students and working professionals” who love to review books on Amazon. “Genuine Book Reviews by Real Readers”, exclaimed her email footer, which did seem like a strange thing for a real reader to include.

“Glenda” promised a five-pillar plan that would generate a “halo of credibility” by peppering the internet with “reviews, reader impressions, and professional impressions that position your work as authoritative and irresistible”.

Inspired by her talk of credibility and professionalism, I decided to ask some basic follow-up questions.

“Thank you for clarifying, it’s all very interesting,” I wrote. “Could you please outline the pricing tiers for the services you are offering, the platforms you will be using, and what the impact/outcomes will be for my book and profile?”

She quickly shot back with a rundown of how her services targeted platforms including Amazon, Goodreads, BookBub Readers, Meta, Reddit, Pinterest and YouTube, and could be enlisted at a range of prices.

She told me about a $465 “Visibility Foundation” tier promised 10 to 16 “reader impressions” on Amazon, plus “engagement seeding” on Goodreads. The pricier full package came in at $1,300.

“Nykky” on the other hand claimed to represent “a tight-knit community of 4,700+ engaged readers across 35 countries” whose services were priced from $10 to $30. When I asked for a link, she provided screenshots of a sparse-looking website that featured an author named “John Smith”.

Glenda also shared testimonials purportedly written by huge names, from John Grisham to Hernán Diaz.

Despite selling more than 300m books since the 1990s, Grisham’s review made the startling claim that, “I had zero views and no visibility before Book Niche ARC strategy.”

Despite winning the Pulitzer prize in 2023, apparently it was thanks to Glenda’s team that Diaz “became more than a writer; I became a brand”. Inspiring stuff.

The irony of this whole episode is that my new book, The Butterfly Thief, is full of stories about theft, fraud and deception. I even touch on email scams in the first few pages.

Scams tend to have a few things in common. First, they play to our emotions. Writing a book is an incredibly emotional undertaking; all that time and effort with no guarantee that anyone will read it, let alone care.

Second, they’re a numbers game – you send enough phishing emails and unsolicited phone calls and you’ll eventually snare someone.

Where these scams hit differently is the use of language models to customise each email to its mark. This grabs our attention in a way that would have been far too laborious before.

I’m lucky to have a publisher, a publicist and enough genuine interest from readers that these emails immediately stick out as inauthentic guff. But I know there are many aspiring authors out there who aren’t in that position, for whom an out-of-the-blue email from someone not only engaging with their work, but wanting to help, is a tempting hook.

It’s for these writers that I’m writing this. If you’re here reading, perhaps after receiving a similar email and jumping on Google, take my advice: take a moment to think, don’t click the links and certainly don’t give them any of your money.

At the end of the day, these word-churning scammers couldn’t exist without us. It’s our words, our human expression, that has been scraped by bots and ripped off by tech giants whose promise of an AI-powered utopia has largely delivered new ways to be annoyed, deceived and defrauded.

Whatever exposure or engagement they’re offering, these fakes in our inbox need us more than we need them.