How to spot a scam
Anansi, Loki, Anarchy, and the joy of heist stories.
I’ve watched Ocean’s Eleven, The Prestige, Inception and The Big Short so many times I could recite the lines. I especially love heists when they’re audacious and improbable and yet you want to believe them anyway.
But in real life, of course, I don’t like being scammed. I’m currently waiting for a replacement bank card after HSBC stopped some attempted fraud. I know so many people who’ve been scammed lately, from fraudsters calling them about their account being compromised and how they need to move all their money to a safe place to writers getting impressive deals from fake agents and publishers, only to have everything collapse around them.
On the flight back to London, I read Andrew Boryga’s Victim, which I’d heard about a while ago. Like Yellowface, it is the story of a grift: a Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx capitalizes on white guilt to sell trauma-porn stories to hipsters.
While reading this book, I was being scouted by a scammer on Instagram. They have since deleted their Instagram as well as all their messages to me, but you can read more about them on Writer Beware. The scammer offered me an unbelievably good PR package, including reviews in the Guardian and the New York Times and five hundred books in sales, all for only $599! As someone who has in fact worked with PR and knows (a) you can’t actually buy some of these things and (b) how much PR usually costs, I was instantly amused at the absurdity of this offer. Most PR firms won’t guarantee you squat in sales, and $599 is usually where they start on monthly fees. But the cincher was their website, which is still up so far (thinqpr.com) where they count Jonathan Franzen among their testimonials, as if he’d engage a PR firm that didn’t know that Crossroads was one word.
Now, as anyone who has been reading my posts for a while knows, I like to taxonomize things. So here is a brief, incomplete taxonomy of scams I’ve become aware of via the writing life.
1. The second voice panacea “scam”
Scam level: Low
Scammer: Yourself
Technically, this isn’t a scam. The person offering you help actually believes, completely and fanatically, that they are doing so. They are “writing partners,” coaches, mentors, beta readers, people who offer critique, guidance, inspiration or accountability. I don’t knock these strategies if they work for you, but you just might find that you’re doing a lot of these things so you can feel as if you’re working on your novel without actually, you know, writing it.
How you know you’re scamming yourself (I have done all these things):
You spend more time talking about writing than writing.
You have “frameworks” and “strategies” for everything, but very little experience putting them into practice with success.
You post your goals on a thread and get a high from people boosting and supporting you with those goals, but never actually accomplish them.
You keep getting feedback on the early chapters of your novel, without ever finishing the later ones.
You shell out a lot of money to have a second, more authoritative voice in your head because you’re not confident about your own.
How to break free: Recognizing your shifter strategies is the first step to confronting them. If you flinched at any of those bullets above, good. You’re on your way.
2. The “pay for things you can’t buy” scam
Scam-level: High
Scammer: Professional con
Also known as “I’ve got a bridge to sell you,” this is someone offering writers representation (for money), publishing (for a reading fee), reviews and PR (for $599!) etc. They will spend time convincing you of their credentials, offering testimonials and contracts and dropping names to sound legit. You’re taken in by their hustle, their confidence. Their key method is to scam you before you have time to fact-check anything. If this scam sounds too good to be true, it is.
How to break free: Buy time and ask around. If they’re pressuring you to commit NOW, or to send money directly instead of via a legit https-enabled website that has cross-references on Google Maps or Trustpilot, walk away.
3. The social justice grift
Scam-level: Extreme
Scammer: Identity or viewpoint exploiter
Reading Victim by Andrew Boryga was refreshing, because it reminded me that so many of these scams are the kind where you actually feel bad denying them. And they’re counting on it. From the famous controversies around Black Lives Matter (there were multiple separate issues) to the various fake non-profits siphoning away money under the pretext of helping victims in Gaza, these scams go big, counting on public sympathy to avoid scrutiny. In the writing world, a recent such scam was run by an author called Freydis Moon. A white author who got called out on their anti-Black racism, Moon then began writing again under at least three other pseudonyms, signing simultaneously with four different agents, all while pretending to be Latinx so they couldn’t be accused of being racist—citing body dysmorphia for why they only had an avatar and never got on a video call. They got away with this for years.
How to break free: Most of these scams rely on you to virtue-signal to your people, bringing more people along. e.g. take a look at the end of a certain donation receipt (their marketer needs to be fired):
Ultimately, how you participate in community is between you and your conscience. Which takes me to…
4. The fake community
Scam-level: Low
Scammer: Influencer
On social media, from time to time, people engage in a “writers lift” or “follow for follow” to boost your follower count (and theirs)—two weeks later, they’ll unfollow you, having got you to boost them. They want you to join their group and critique their work, but when you ask them to critique yours, they’ll claim they don’t read in that genre / they’re busy. They might ask you to pay some nominal fee or engage their social media in exchange for which they’ll post about you or share a very artistic photo of your book (with some flowers and coffee) to their thousands of followers. They might also operate in combo with the social justice grift above, using moments like Women’s Day and calls of “women empowering women!” to boost their visibility.
How to break free: One such scammer offered to boost me on Instagram, but disappeared the moment I asked her how she measured efficacy. How did she know how many sales were due to her post? What kind of click-tracking was she using? The key is that visibility does not equal sales. And unless you actually know these people, walk away at the first sign the relationship isn’t immediately reciprocal.
5. The AI grifts
Scam-level: Beyond comprehension
Scammer: Anyone and everyone
The sheer number and scale of these scams meant I had to leave this section to the end, lest it take up the whole space. Here are some signs of an AI grift:
Saying something is “AI-powered” and therefore costs more, e.g. Canva raising their prices by 300%
Opting you and your data into AI by default, e.g. the Anthropic lawsuit, the NYT suing OpenAI, and only Europeans being allowed to opt out of Instagram using your posts as training data.
Publishers using AI to lower costs and avoid paying employees and creators, e.g. Tor using AI to generate book covers, or Angry Robot using Storywise AI to grade submissions before they reach an editor. (Note: unpublished works are not under copyright, so even if an AI did train on your manuscript, you can’t really sue).
AI-generated scam books on Amazon that grift off a similar, successful book.
Children’s book authors using AI to generate images that would otherwise involve paying artists and waiting for them.
People who charge for book reviews (already a grift, see #2, since any author who pays for reviews gets immediately removed from Amazon) but then use AI to write the reviews.
Meta changing their UI so you’ll default to using AI to target your ads.
How to break free:
This takes me to the beginning of this post, and to why I love heist stories. Because the scale and speed with which AI is transforming the world is staggering, and it’s not exactly as if you can escape the clutch of every company in the world. Even governments are struggling, because the legal terrain is so chaotic and new that even if there could be laws applied here, getting everyone to agree will take years, and enforcing them in any meaningful way will take decades. It’s truly as if the cars have taken to the skies, and we’re still trying to use traffic lights to manage them.
The only way to escape a web of power like this is with a heist. I’m currently reading a book, Anansi’s Gold, by local author Yepoka Yeebo. Anansi, a mythological spider creature who spins wise, witty stories that change the world, is “often celebrated as a symbol of slave resistance and survival, because Anansi is able to turn the tables on his powerful oppressors by using his cunning and trickery.”
This meticulously researched book tells the tale of Ghana’s idealistic first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, the man who conned the world in search of stolen colonial treasure. Featuring a wild cast of characters including Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr, Shirley Temple and the CIA, Yeebo tells the story of how the world and the modern history of Ghana were forever changed by a great storyteller.
Ultimately, great scams are great stories—stories we want to believe. Like tulpas (thank you, Supernatural, for my extensive taxonomy of mythological creatures) we bring new technologies, new ideologies and new worlds into being by powering them with our curiosity and conviction and our narrative power.
We need to start telling a better story than “AI can do it all for you, and better than you, and cheaply!” It shouldn’t be that hard.
