The Email Chain that keeps on giving
In part 1, the fake managing editor of a publishing house contacted me, interested in the second book in my Legendary Artifact Series, and asked if I had an agent. I introduced them to Cavin Rankin, the best agent money can buy, unless you get him angry. After Cavin went off on Johanna, I had to step in. Johanna recommended I explore alternative representation and switch to a different email client to prevent Cavin from finding out. What fun would that be? Of course he’s going to find out; we’re kind of the same person.
I wanted to pursue this scam in the most complicated way possible at this point, which was probably a mistake because I didn’t get to the entire story. There were three basic ideas: I would try and flirt with Johanna as the lovesick fictional author Christopher Harris, Cavin would find out about my switch in representation and begin to harass both all the scammers in play and me, and my family friend, Janelle Scott, would be trying to help me while talking to her brother, Tim, who heads a government cybersecurity task force.
If you’ve read chapter two of this series, you’ll see that this is a well I come back to from time to time. I’ve always loved messing with scammers and have messed with romance scammers in the past. I read an article that said some romance scammers have switched to literary scams. I am always trying to see whether the scammer I am dealing with was a former romance scammer, and I’m interested to see if they’ll dust off their old tricks. Johanna doesn’t take the bait after the first email.
Johanna is trying to get this scam back on track. This is the normal line if you don’t create a fictitious agent with anger management issues. The publishing house is not allowed to deal with authors one-on-one. In other, less funny exchanges, I’ve responded to this by telling them that I’m authorized to make deals on my behalf or that I am a former literary agent, which seems to shut these claims down. Interestingly, Johanna wants to introduce me to Matthew, who I looked up and is an actual literary agent and lawyer. He doesn’t represent fantasy books and the provided email if from his closed company/website. It didn’t give me a bit of a pause and I wondered if I was actually talking to the real Matthew.
And that’s the amazing thing about these scams: I know they’re scammers. I’ve spent hours messing around with them and know all the tells, but even I have those second-guessing moments where I wonder if I’m actually alienating a real person. But I just look through my emails and see all the places where a real person would have said, “That doesn’t seem right.” There are so many places for these scammers to call me out, but they don’t because they just want their money.
I tried a second email to flirt with Johanna, but I didn’t hear from her for a while after this. And, yes, this is how awkward I am at flirting. It seems the scammer was more interested in communicating with me via Matthew, who was trying to get me to the goal post and get that hard-earned cash. Matt took one look at my query letter and said it needed work, and I could either work with him to improve it or a professional query letter editor he could introduce me to. So, now, they’re up to three fake people, and I’m still just one real person with a fake agent.
I am really confused that Matt says my query letter needs work. This is the same query letter I sent to Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. They’re chomping at the bit for my book and have a six-figure deal just waiting to be signed. It’s funny how the scammer treats me differently than the fake literary agent. The scammers tried to explain away any misgivings Cavin had, but they bulldozed over any problems I noticed. It shows what these scammers think of the authors they target: we’re dumb marks. They know all they have to do is appeal to our hope and we’ll be willing to belive the most ridiculous things. But Cavin, he was a professional and his bottom line wasn’t going to increase if I signed with these scammers as opposed to the very real offers I had on the table from other publishing companies /s.
I tell Matt I’m going to send my query letter to Janelle, my agent for my first book, and see what she says. This starts a slew of emails between Janelle and me. Do you know how weird it is to email yourself pretending to be different people? It’s also kind of fun. While that’s going on, it’s time to reintroduce Cavin, and he comes in hard.
I researched the real Matthew and included those details in the cease-and-desist letter that Cavin sent him. It is very important that I don’t make any overt threats in these emails. Even though this is all make-believe and I’m communicating with scammers, real threats are still a crime. This was probably the only time that I received a truly human response in any of these emails. Matthew forwarded this email back to the author, Christopher Harris. Based on my experience with other scams, the clients they use can’t automate functions with CC, BCC, forwarding, and replying all.
I wanted to make sure that all the parties were aware of how dangerous Cavin could be. What I didn’t expect was guardrails. Anyone with experience using an AI chatbot or looking up information on an AI search engine knows that all these clients have guardrails in place when things like suicide or domestic abuse are brought up, and that’s exactly what I received in response.
Guardrails activated. This formatting is very AI-like. The numbered actions, along with bulleted information between each heading, are exactly how AI tells you to do things. I was surprised to get this response. I’ve always wondered what tools scammers use to write their emails. Can they just use ChatGPT and tell it, “Help me scam this person?” I was hoping that forwarding the email would elevate this chain to a person, but this response let me know real people weren’t interacting with it. So, I decided to up the ante. TRIGGER WARNING: A fictional animal is mentioned in the following email. This fictional animal is found dead. If it helps, replace the pet species with an animal you dislike or a fantastical animal like a hydra or goblin.
I went on to inform Matthew that the FBI was now involved. They needed information from all parties including:
The reference to their computer networks is there to hopefully make the scammers sweat. They are emailing from somewhere halfway around the world. If actual crimes are happening and the FBI is involved, they’ll find out that the IP addresses that are being used are routed through countries with server farms and can trace the IP address back to the original location.
I’m unsure what to make of this message. I expected panic from Matthew, but instead he brushed off my request and recommended I continue to work with the authority figures. I guess he’s not too worried about his involvement if all that has really happened is a cat died. I get the following emails from Johanna and Matthew indicating they’re done trying to scam me:
Did you notice how Johanna’s email is signed Matthew? Yep, confirming what we knew all along: one scammer pretending to be three people. While all this has been going on, I’ve been emailing Janelle constantly. She has discovered these people are scammers, but while this was all happening, something horrible occurred. Johanna was found murdered, and they suspect Cavin did it. I was really trying to get them to take the bait, but Matthew didn’t reply when I informed him that Cavin got Johanna and was probably coming for him next. They truly were done with me. I sent one final email to see if I could get a response:
Most times, even after I’ve told the scammers to fuck off, they send follow-up emails to keep their last message fresh in my inbox. I never hear from any of these emails again. My personal email, which I used to orchestrate the second half of the scam, has never been contacted by a literary scammer, while Janelle’s and Cavin’s keep getting emails from new scammers assuming they’re authors.