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...

I agreed to pay the book club - but after rather than before the event...

While the questions may have been AI-generated, the voices seemed human. They did not always align with their pictures...

I'm 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...

"Not every author is a narcissist, but they all want to be recognized… 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 personalized. 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...

Scam recipients often find the emails they receive haphazard and random. But the modern scam industry is a highly organized system modeled on the global corporate setup, with clearly laid-out deliverables, salaries, incentives and reporting structures...

"I had paid $10,000 for that... I wanted my money back"...

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 like Hurst, which published my first book in the U.K. Bold promises greeted me on the home page...

"You could see how the human brain works. It's actually scary when you think about it"...

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...

Salil Mahmood, who asked that I change his name, is another self-described ex-scammer from Karachi. He reached out to me after hearing from Danny de Hek about the article I was writing. Compared to some of the more outrageous deals his seniors offered their clients...

While he only worked there for a few months, he said the setup was highly aspirational for those who wanted to make serious money. "The bosses would show us pictures of their lifestyles: mansions, fast cars, parties and lots of alcohol. If you met your targets, they would have a rented car drive you around." But in keeping with the nature of such enterprises, failure was not an option. "If an employee did not meet the target, they and their families were threatened with violence," he said...

It is happening all over the world...

Source: https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/ai-book-scams

Holy gracious smokes...
This is such a sorrow...
Please... please... dear Artists, People... please don't give up! Please just do the miracle, your professional, ingenious, the invaluably precious, ineffably magnificent Art!