Ah, those scamster/hamsters — have they got a deal for you, bubala!

(If you’re fool enough to be taken in.)

Now, I’ll admit, when a stranger with a plausible name drops me an email out of the blue and tells me how much he admires some book of mine, with words that resonate surprisingly well, — not gonna lie — there’s a moment of pleasure. He wants to help me bring my books to the attention of other readers, to spread the word, etc., etc., and for a moment…

Well, only for a split second, really. Then I realize why the words resonate — they’re taken from my own blurbs, not absolutely identical, but synonyms or rephrases, to try and hide the source better from me. Or (another clue) the book being admired is a nothing — the mid-book in a series, a short story, whatever — not the main books or first in a series, as one might expect from an actual fan, or even a genuine business man, interested in helping me make money (well, I’m sure he is a business man, just not in the business he claims). Who would think I wanted to market a series beginning with a middle volume?

So, the (now obvious to me) falseness tempers my evanescent deluded pleasure, and now (in my irritation at my fading gullibillity) I want to know how the scam is structured as a business. I mean, they’re really lazy, after all. They’ll give you an email address line which doesn’t actually exist, if you search for it or try to reply — they supply a link instead as the way of you connecting with their offer (“Danger, Will Robinson”). You’d think they’d at least bother with a dummy website for nominal verisimilitude for their “business services” rather than the simple link as a bypass.

Obviously the server farm that employs these folks has distributed a list of my titles in their hands, the blurbs are available for all to see, and the email address is probably easy to come by (I make no effort to suppress it). There must be hundreds of authors in their feeds — they only need to get lucky and batten onto a sucker a small percentage of the time.

So: how can a scamster work the come-on efficiently? I’m sure it’s straight-forward: lists of books, emails, etc. But what about that enticing “I sure loved…” extended set of words, professing interest, that makes me potentially drop my guard in pleasure and treat it as genuine, at first glance?

I bet that’s AI. I bet that they take a blurb off Amazon and use AI to source it as slightly modified vocabulary for the email, as suggestive as an expression of genuine interest and compatibility as my theoretical reader (for whom the blurb is intended) might be, in the hope that I won’t recognize the original source but will bond with them when they feed a masqueraded version of my own blurb back at me — weaponizing my own marketing, as it were.

Gotta say, I have to admire the psychology of that wrinkle in their method, while despising the attempts.

I tell ya, I can’t even get crooks to treat me seriously. Sigh…

What are some of your scam encounters like? What irritates you the most?