The Email Chain That Started it All
Buckle up and get ready for a long story. This was the email chain that started it all, and it’s a doozy. Betrayal, abuse, and murder are all in this wild tale of scammers trying to get an author to do one little thing: Give them money.
As mentioned in the introduction, I made a series of Instagram posts discussing all the various literary scams I had encountered. The series addressed the types of scams, how they got your contact information, what the scam would look like, and how much money they’d try to get from you. There was one scam I never interacted with: the fake publishing editor scam.
Most scams have a level of believability. It makes sense that a book club may not have its own website and instead use Gmail. But if you’ve ever tried to go the traditional publishing route, you know that publishing houses have a very specific format for their emails. It usually looks something like this: [email protected] (or whatever country they’re based in). The fake publishing editor scam usually uses emails like this: [email protected]. If you go onto some publishers’ websites, they even address this email issue.
But, even though I knew it was a scam, I felt like I owed it to my non-existent audience to find out where the scam would ask me for money and how much. I decided to answer one of their emails with this express purpose.
Most of these emails aren’t complete. Scammers’ emails are very repetitive, and this exchange spanned over fifty emails back and forth between me, my two fake agents, and the three scammer email addresses they were using. At first, my goal was to end the scam as quickly as possible, so instead of going through the trouble of concocting an email for my fake agent, I decided to have him reply through my email. Of course, my agent manages my email-don’t all agents? The scammer never questioned that.
My fake agent went through a couple of name changes during this interaction because of typos and because I realized his original intended name (Calvin Rankin) was an X-Man, which probably explains why it came to mind. He eventually became Cavin Rankin after this exchange. I was also writing these emails while juggling work projects and didn’t spend much time editing them. I had no idea I’d be putting them together for a book project later.
This will become a recurring theme for the first part of this scam. Cavin wants a deal today, but Johanna keeps insisting we proceed through the normal process. The process Johanna is proposing is anything but normal. She wants me to send sample chapters and a query letter for an already published book that she says her publishing house wants to acquire. They also want to acquire the second book in the series before acquiring the first. It’s amazing that whatever AI agent they are using doesn’t notice that this is odd.
Cavin starts off listing all the books I’m currently writing and the amazing achievements of my published books. None of the books he mentions, except one, are currently in any state that could be considered WiP. Did you know Magi’s Curse sold over 3,500 units in the first year, was awarded the Writer’s Digest Book of the Year, and nominated for a World Fantasy Award? Neither did I, and apparently, neither did Johanna. Cavin will lie about everything to get his client the deal.
After portraying me as a whale who was about to sign with another publishing house, Johanna steps up the offensive. Judging by the scammer’s previous emails, they’re halfway around the world, but Cavin keeps them up late trying to land me as a client. Of course, Cavin wants a deal, a deal they can’t get him, because that’s not their scam. I never got to the payment offroad, but as best I can tell, they want me to pay for editing services on my query letter and sample chapters so the publishing house will purchase my already published book. If a traditional publisher wants your book, they’ll pay for all the editing. That’s the reason they get a bigger cut of the book’s royalties.
After a dozen or so back-and-forth emails, Cavin begins to lose his temper. Johanna keeps insisting everything must follow the normal process, which is anything but normal. Cavin pushes for a deal, and Johanna says they can’t do that because they haven’t reviewed the book internally. I am still just trying to figure out when they’ll charge me money and for what, so I’m getting increasingly annoyed as well and its coming through in Cavin’s emails. These are the last two he sent her:
Cavin had threatened to contact the president of Akashic Books previously (they’re old golf buddies). This amped up the pressure on the scammer, and they were put in the difficult position of trying to keep Cavin happy enough so he wouldn’t make this call. In an impersonation scam, the best way for it to fall apart is for the victim to contact the real person. But after that last email, I didn’t hear back from Johanna. I was afraid I had lost her, so it was time for me to step in as the author and get things back on track.
Johanna answered right away, which was surprising. It was already late afternoon. The scammer’s emails usually came between two and five am, which meant this scammer had been up for at least twelve hours by now. However, they were happy they were starting to regain control of the scam.
In this email, Johanna offers alternative representation. This is a normal part of the scam. Self-published authors normally don’t have agents unless they are also traditionally published or published by an independent publishing house. In a typical version of this scam, an editor from the publishing house contacts a self-published author. The author says they don’t have an agent, and then the scammer introduces them to an agent for representation. It is a pincer impersonation scam in which a scammer pretends to be two people working together to convince the author to buy bogus services.
For a little color, I added another detail: Cavin has no problem hitting his clients, and I’m afraid of what will happen if he finds out I’m pursuing alternative representation. This is what we call foreshadowing in the literary world. If these scammers knew anything about books, they’d know that Cavin wasn’t just going to go away.
