It can be really hard to make scammers do something entertaining sometimes. You can spend dozens of emails trying to goad them into getting angry or taking offense, but you spend all your time talking to the AI chatbot and never interact with a real person. Sometimes they set you up for something hilarious in their first email. When Minal emailed me trying to convince me to pay her ~$150 for a useless feature in her non-existent book club, she decided to try and be cute and funny. Bad move.
Before we get into this one, I want to remind people that this is not a real person I’m talking to in this case, and even if a real person is reviewing these emails, they are most likely a man impersonating a woman. I have yet to get to the end of a single scam email chain and find a woman behind the screen. I never got a real person to respond, but the AI just didn’t know what to do when I informed it that yes, we had actually met in person.
I have cut out much of Minal’s conversation because it’s the generic book club scam. The gist is that Minal runs a book club with thousands of readers, and my book is exactly what they crave. If I show interest, she’ll let me know there is a fee associated. Sometimes it’s a payment for the book club to review your book, for promotional materials, for snacks for the meeting, or as a voluntary donation. What Minal doesn’t know is that the fictional author, Christopher Harris, is always looking for love in the wrong places. And I really thought we had that when we met last year at the South by Southwest literary festival.
The great thing about AI is that it’s made to always be agreeable. Rather than deny that we had ever met, the AI incorporates this new information and tries to get on with the scam. This is always a good way to tell if an AI is scamming you. If you insist you’ve met, or have worked together before, the AI will roll with it. This also goes with providing the AI with false information. Rather than deny the false information, it will incorporate it and not push back. I did this recently when a fake author emailed me. I told them how much I appreciated how candid they were with their struggles with meth and how I knew they were innocent and was so glad to see them released from prison.
The AI has accepted my lie, but would like to get back to their own lie so they can try to steal from me, but I’m not going to just let this go. I’m wounded. Her never calling me back left me with emotional scars.
Minal is putting her foot down. She has no desire to discuss our romantic rendezvous. I was really hoping I’d get a real person on this one and have them discuss their favorite details of that night, but I guess they weren’t that hard up for the sale. But the AI’s discomfort was enough to keep me going.
This is something you often see with scammers: they offer to pull back. Even if you do tell them that you’re not interested at this point, you’ll receive another email about a month later, acting like you never told them to buzz off. Once you reply, you’ve become a potential target, and they will continually email you, sometimes with no message, just to keep their emails fresh in your inbox. It is best to block them, and eventually your email client will learn to send these types of emails directly to spam. I don’t want to lose Minal yet, I feel like there is still potential in this interaction.
Cavin, the best hype man money can buy to the rescue!
Things always get a little buggy when you introduce a third email into the mix. Even in scams that ask whether you have an agent, the AI bots struggle to handle two separate emails. They don’t know how to email someone that is cc’ed on an email, or won’t reply all to group emails, even if you tell them to. I didn’t know if she would respond to Cavin, but it is always worth a shot.
In all the cases where I’ve used Cavin, no one has ever called him out for working at Best Literary Agency, USA, a fictional company I concocted for this little project. Of course, Minal didn’t respond, and that is sometimes the way things go, but in my experience, adding urgency to the situation will sometimes keep them on the line and up late trying to get you to send them some money.
Cavin spends every weekend in Vegas. It’s his birthday every weekend. Alas, Minal didn’t bite, and we never had the chance to talk to the scammer behind the bot. If I hadn’t derailed Minal’s pitch so monumentally, she would have asked me for a headshot, Q&A, a book trailer, and/or a professionally produced introduction video. If I didn’t have any of those things, she’d offer to supply them for a small fee. I never give money to these scams to see what the eventual product is, but I’ve checked out the Facebook profiles of some of these fake book accounts.
They do post something on their Facebook. Usually, the author follows them and comments on the post. Then a couple of other Facebook users comment that the book sounds great and they’re going to buy a copy. When you click on these profiles, they’re completely empty. No post history, details that don’t match their profile picture, and recent account creation. Things can get a little harder with Facebook because they ban you for having multiple accounts, but you can create separate pages linked to a central account, so I’m not sure how the scammers do it on their end.