How to Avoid Scams: What Authors Need to Know

Ferol Vernon (00:03)

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Written Word Media Pod. I am Farrell Vernon here with Ricky Wolman as always. And today we’re talking about scams. Ricky, ⁓ it’s very tough episode. talked about whether or not to do this. thought, you know, this is almost a public service episode where we’ve seen so much of this stuff ⁓ that we just feel really bad and like we need to kind of.

Ricci (00:15)

Unfortunately.

Yeah, for sure. Unfortunately, especially the last couple of months, there have been a pretty big increase in scams that are targeting authors specifically. And it, you know, it really just sucks. ⁓ And authors, some authors have actually fallen for these scams because they’ve become so much more sophisticated than they used to be. And so yeah, this is our PSA this week to talk a little bit about the psychology of a scam.

Ferol Vernon (00:39)

Yeah.

Ricci (00:56)

and what some of the scams are out there right now that are targeting authors and how to protect yourself.

Ferol Vernon (01:01)

Yeah, and for the authors out there that have maybe fallen for one of these or engaged with them, I get it. We’ve had a few authors email us some of these scams and be like, hey, do you know anything about this as part of what prompted the episode? And man, they’re really good. These things are, the emails are just incredibly compelling. And I think that kind of leads us into how we wanted to kick off the episode. It’s like talking about the psychology of these scams and what are the hooks? What sort of…

emotional techniques are they using to try to, you know, get somebody hooked on one of these things.

Ricci (01:36)

Yeah, so the psychology of a scam is both ⁓ what the scam uses, but it also can really act as a red flag for you as an author. So in general, if you get an email that makes you feel intensely positive or intensely negative, that’s usually a red flag. ⁓ And so some scams will prey on hopes and dreams. And you get an email that says something like, we can make you a bestselling author. I loved your book so much. I’d love to represent you as an agent.

the things that you really are hoping and dreaming for and you get that email that you’re like, I’ve always wanted to get this email. Sometimes these, you know, in very rare cases, cases, these emails might actually be okay. But the very first thing to do if you get an email that makes you feel very joyful is to kind of stop and be like, is this real? And then on the flip side, preying on emotions of anxiety and fear. And this is when you get an email that has some sense of urgency.

Ferol Vernon (02:28)

and

Ricci (02:32)

or tells you you owe a ton of money, you are in violation of Amazon’s terms, and if you don’t do something in the next 24 hours, all your books are gonna be taken down, or outside of author life, I get these text messages all the time, like your tolls haven’t been paid in Massachusetts, and your license is gonna be revoked, and I know that these are a scam, and it still makes my blood pressure go up, right? I read that and my heart rate goes up, and I’m like, my God, did I forget to do something?

Ferol Vernon (02:47)

Yeah.

That’s yeah, exactly.

Ricci (02:59)

And I didn’t, but they know that when you’re in a psychologically heightened state or an emotional state, you’re not thinking as rationally and you’re more apt to take action that they want you to take, but that’s not in your best interest.

Ferol Vernon (03:13)

Yep. Yeah. I think like, you know, these scams, like, and I think we should start, let’s start with the joyful ones because I think these feel like a little more common. feel like the, anxiety and the scary ones where you have to do something at the end, like right away tend to be more broad. These joyful ones tend to be more focused on authors. At least that’s what we’re hearing. And it’s everything from like, Hey, you know, something kind of mild, but still positive. Like, Hey, our book club loves your book. And.

we want you to come talk about it and by the way, there’s a fee, right? ⁓ To things that are bigger, like, hey, we have a movie deal for you, right? And those, the psychology of that is, ⁓ you know, to get people excited. And when you’re excited, you know, it can make sort of rash decisions. ⁓ And one of the big problems is these emails are really compelling because they have your book or, know, they can look at the reviews and they’re mostly AI generated. ⁓

but they have really salient data about your characters, about your setting, about how long the book’s been published. And it can be really hard to figure out like what’s good and what’s bad. So Ricky, like what are some themes, are some ways authors can pick apart one of these emails and try to figure out like what’s real and what’s not?

Ricci (04:28)

Yeah, well, think just hitting on that idea of the sophistication of the scams, I think is important. And I want to double down on that for a second, because, you know, a few years ago, you could even when the scams were hitting on, you know, joyful and happiness and positive, you could usually spot that they were scams because they were misspellings or the English wasn’t that good. You know, our friends in Nigeria, you know, were well known for the kind of

Nigerian prints and all of that kind of stuff. today, because you can just go in and use AI and Farrell to your point, because you can get so much information about somebody, the scams come across as very authentic. It feels like somebody has read your book. It feels like somebody has done their research. The language is very good. It feels like somebody who’s literary, somebody who’s educated, somebody who would speak to you in this way. ⁓

Ferol Vernon (05:07)

Yeah.

Ricci (05:24)

And so it’s very convincing and just to sidebar here for a second. This, this isn’t really in, in scam world, but we get a ton of outreach on like LinkedIn and from people who trying to get us to, you know, purchase services with them. And Farrell, do you want to tell the story about that conference you went to and the email that you received?

Ferol Vernon (05:36)

totally.

my God, that was terrifying.

Yeah. So like I, I went to this conference with our son. and I’m not going to mention names or where I was, but, ⁓ we went to this conference together. It was a really cool experience for me to be there with him. And I, I posted a little note on LinkedIn about it and I had some specifics in there, you know, didn’t mention his name necessarily. ⁓ but what happened is I got an email from somebody and they had clearly like digested this LinkedIn post.

and it referenced all the different things. It referenced the location where we were. It referenced my son. They guessed at his age and they got it almost right. ⁓ And then they made a small offer that was like barely an ask, but I’m sure it’s just to like get you to reply to see if your email is even there. But it was.

Ricci (06:31)

I think they were just asking

you to like set up a meeting, right? And they made it sound like it made it, they made it sound like you had met, like the email to Farrell was like, Hey, it was great to meet you and your son at this conference. I’d love to follow up on the conversation. And Farrell was like, did I meet this person? Like, you know, you, you spent some time trying to remember. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (06:34)

Yeah, it’s like get a call.

Yes. ⁓ yeah.

Yeah.

You second, you second guessed

yourself because especially for anybody who’s ever been to a conference and you know, as we’re recording this, I’m coming back from author nation. probably talked to hundreds of authors. And so if anybody’s ever been to a conference, you talk to a ton of people and like, you got to stack a business card. You kind of remember some of the people you had interesting conversations with, but some of them you sort of, you you forget and you’re like, you remember sort of the person’s face and the book, but like maybe you can’t place their name. And so I, you know, I had a really hard time remembering whether or not I’d actually talk and talk to this person.

And when you kind of unpack the email, like, you know, this doesn’t make sense. ⁓ You know, that they’re asking me about this certain thing. And, you know, we ultimately ignored it, but it was one of those things where I think a second set of eyes helps. Like, Ricky, I remember showing you and like telling you about it. And I think a lot of authors, we had one actually right into the inbox today who shared one with us. And I think it’s one of those times where it’s so good. You’re like pretty sure it’s not real, but you like would feel better if somebody else told you, yeah, it’s not real.

Ricci (07:29)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (07:44)

And so, know, if you encounter one of these, you know, feel free to email us and ask us to look at it for you. We’re not the experts, but, you know, one of the ones that somebody sent us in, we were able to tell, you know, pretty easily, hey, yeah, that’s not a reputable person in the industry. Don’t reply. But I think these things can, you know, anything you put out there, for me, it was a very small LinkedIn post. But for authors, it’s their book, ⁓ which has to be out there if you want people to buy it.

And people can sort of pick apart that content and write really compelling AI stuff.

Ricci (08:17)

Yeah. And it’s not just your book. If you have social media presence, if you have a blog, if they subscribe to your email list, unfortunately AI can digest all of this information and then come up with a really compelling pitch. So I think the very first thing is like trusting your gut. Right? So like when Farrell first got that, that email, he felt like something was off. Like I don’t remember meeting this guy. Like I don’t think this is right. ⁓ so trust your gut. If something feels a little off, like that’s, that’s a good, you know, warning, internal warning.

Ferol Vernon (08:20)

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Ricci (08:47)

And then, yeah, show it to somebody else to get a second opinion. And then the third thing is to like really try and these, has sent you this thing. So try and look up the company, try and look up the person. Never, ever, ever send money would be the most important thing. So even if it’s super compelling and you want to reach, you you want to say, okay, I’m going to have a conversation with this person.

Ferol Vernon (08:49)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Ricci (09:12)

⁓ you never want to send money, especially over PayPal or one of those services where you can’t Venmo, where you can’t get it back. and nobody should be asking for, you know, cash upfront or very early on. so yeah, but it’s, it is, is, you know, kind of tricky, ⁓ to, to figure out who is legitimate and who isn’t. and on that note, the other, ⁓

Ferol Vernon (09:16)

or Venmo or Zelle, anything like that.

Ricci (09:39)

scam that’s proliferating is impersonation because these scammers can now pull companies that are reputable, they can pull other authors that are reputable. So there was actually, I think a situation where scammers were impersonating an author and saying, Hey, I’m this author. I’d love to do a swap with you. And the author on the other side was like, huh, that’s weird. And actually DM the author through social media.

Ferol Vernon (10:07)

The real

author. Yeah. Yeah, right.

Ricci (10:07)

The real author and the real author is like, I never sent you this email. This is not me.

So there’s impersonation going on, both people impersonating authors, but also people impersonating companies. Like we’ve gotten a few emails saying, ⁓ people said, you know, I got this email from written word media. ⁓ and it absolutely definitely wasn’t from us. And so in order to check that you always want to check who the email comes from. It should come from the domain in our case from at written word media.com.

Ferol Vernon (10:26)

Correct.

Ricci (10:35)

⁓ Scammers are very tricky. They might put two M’s in there. ⁓ Penguin Random House might have two I’s. It’s something that’s really hard to spot. So when you’re looking at the from email, you need to literally look at it letter for letter and make sure that it 100 % matches the domain of the company that you think that you’re dealing with.

Ferol Vernon (10:42)

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, you one of the things that’s hard is like, you definitely want to check the domain. You want to check the reputation if you can, you know, and then another one of the things as hard as it’s much easier today to set up fake websites, even like fake chat rooms and things like that. And so, you know, if this initial outreach, if they kind of get past somebody on that initial one, then like, Hey, you know, the website that you Google might actually look okay, right? With AI, it’s pretty easy to spin up a, easy looking website.

So there’s kind of a checklist of things you need to go through when you get one of these emails that where you’re

as Ricky says, like if your gut says, hey, there might be something off here, there usually is, and that’s time to do your homework.

Ricci (11:33)

Yeah, for sure. So maybe we can talk a little bit about a couple of the specific scams that are happening right now. The one that seems to be prolific and the most popular is this book club scam where ⁓ I think most indie authors have gotten an email saying, hey, you know, we run a book club. We run a group that caters to book clubs and we’d love to have you come and join. And our book club has always review the books.

Ferol Vernon (11:40)

Yeah.

Ricci (12:03)

and then they pull you into a community on Discord and the community looks like there’s a lot of chatter. And then the kind of soft sell is, well, these reviewers and these people who are working in the book clubs and working to review your book, it would be so great if you could tip them because they’re spending time doing this. And then the ask is to tip five or $20 to these people, quote unquote, who are just bots. They’re not people, they’re not leaving reviews.

It’s also against Amazon’s terms of service to pay for reviews. So any service that says, you can pay and get a bunch of reviews is, you know, to not legit. If it is legit, the chances those reviews are going to get pulled down by Amazon is pretty high.

Ferol Vernon (12:38)

Mm-hmm.

Very high.

Yeah. And I think that this is the thing that, you know, you have to be careful about is it’s like, it, if it, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Right. And I think the thing is the part of the reason why this scam so effective is because the bots now know about the content of your book because they’re able to, you know, go through it with a, with a chat bot or something. So when you get into that community, everybody’s talking about your book and your characters, right. And the things that you created that are really like emotional and close to your heart, because you’re the artist, right. You’re the author. ⁓ So I think it can really play.

on this sort of emotional component. But again, back to kind of what we said earlier in the episode, if somebody’s asking you for a tip and they want you to send them some Bitcoin or they want you to send them Venmo or something like that, I think it’s good for all authors to step policy. Hey, I don’t send money over the internet for things like that. Is there a credit card page? One of the things when you buy unwritten word media, we pay sort of security services. We have an engineering team.

You can trust that like, you know, we’re handling your data well. And we have a credit card page where you put your stuff in and you check out. And you know, most scammers will ask you to send them money directly rather than going through a checkout process with the green lock up in your browser. And that’s one thing you can tell pretty much anybody and they should understand if they’re reputable, hey, I’m not gonna send money through these channels.

Ricci (14:14)

Yeah, because if you do fall for a scam and you put your credit card down and you actually pay for something and it turns out to be a scam or the service is not delivered, you can actually go to your credit card company and dispute that and you will get your money back because the credit card company will claw it back from the end recipient. So you do have some level of protection there that’s really important.

Ferol Vernon (14:33)

Yeah, but you’re not gonna have the same thing on Venmo or especially not if you’re sending Bitcoin or crypto or anything like that. So just need to be really careful about that.

One of things, Ricky, I wanted to just like say like on this ⁓ scams, I I actually have one of these emails pulled up that we got that like, actually I’m not going to name names, but the, one of our authors, like awesome person ⁓ forwarded this us just to be a good citizen and say, Hey, I thought, you know, other authors want to know. I wanted to maybe just read like the first few sentences so people can get a sense for like what these, what these things say.

So I’m going to, I’m going to the first words of the title. not going to say the title, but it’s titled a book burst with the kind of unapologetic energy and originality readers rarely encounter in today’s mystery scene. It’s a reverent layered, completely alive, a rare blend of sharp intellect, humor, and raw humanity. Character name isn’t just a character. He’s a perspective, flawed, observant, and strangely endearing in his fight to make sense of an upside down world. Right? So you read something like that and it’s like, it’s got the main character’s name. It’s got.

Adjectives that accurately describe the person And it starts with all the stuff and it’s really you know If I wrote this book like you feel warned me like that’s great Like somebody’s saying these really nice things about my book like, know at that point they’ve they’ve made a connection and I think that’s where ⁓ You know for authors out there spidey sense has got to go up

Ricci (16:02)

Yeah, for sure. It’s unfortunate, ⁓ I wish we were back in the days of the Nigerian prince and misspelling scams.

Ferol Vernon (16:09)

It’s much

easier to spot, right? The spelling and the grammar on this thing’s perfect. Yeah. So I think, you know, what we were hoping all authors understand is that, you know, these scams are playing on positive emotions and then negative emotions, right? And I think like kind of our, you know, checklist that we’ve gone through so far is, you know, don’t send money, right? Get another pair of eyes on anything that comes through that feels fishy. ⁓ And then…

Ricci (16:14)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (16:39)

do your homework and make sure that these sources are reputable. And I think that’s a pretty good place to start. ⁓ But I think it’s worth going through one or two of these scams that we’ve seen that are sort of topical to make sure that people know about it.

Ricci (16:53)

Yeah, I do want to touch on the negative scam because usually these tend to involve like Amazon or a large retailer. So when you get an email that says, Hey, you, you have violated Amazon’s terms. We’re going to pull your books down or, you owe back paying royalties on your Google play books or things of that nature. And then a lot of the time they might include actually like a phone number.

Ferol Vernon (16:56)

Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Yup.

Ricci (17:22)

which is like call customer service right away. And what you really want to be careful about is like calling a number and giving a lot of personally identifiable information or giving a credit card on that phone call or giving any login information because you don’t want somebody to actually be able to get into your accounts and change bank account information. So they’re your royalties. They don’t get sent to you. They get sent, you know, somewhere else in the world. So although currently there are a lot of these kind of

Ferol Vernon (17:41)

Yeah.

Ricci (17:52)

Positive warm and fuzzy like your book so great you know we’d love to have you do x y and z and then pay us x y z there are ones that can. You know make your heart jump into your throat and make you you know really fearful about the status of your book or the status of your i’m standing with one of the retailers that might be out there.

Ferol Vernon (17:55)

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that the part of the reason why that one hits so hard is because any author that’s dealt with Amazon or really any of the retailers, like stuff does get mucked up. Sometimes your price doesn’t drop. Sometimes this doesn’t happen. like, know, so when, when that stuff comes, you’re like, my gosh, this is one of those times when something has gone wrong with my book being listed on one of these retailers. And the truth is it’s not one of those times, but because you’ve had that experience before you’re sort of primed to be receptive.

to, no, there’s a problem with Amazon and I got to take care of it right away. Because, you know, when it does happen for real, like you do have to take care of it right away, right? If Amazon’s saying, we’re to pull your book down or something, unless you send us X, Y, and Z, you know, you do have to respond to them. ⁓ But these scammers are sort of taking that dynamic and using it to their advantage.

Ricci (19:01)

Yeah, it’s always, whatever you get is always plausible, right? That’s just plausible enough that you’re not going to dismiss it outright. It’s close enough to something that has happened or that you’ve heard of something happening that you’re like, ⁓ this could be true. This could be right. ⁓ And so trying to figure out what is actually fact from fiction in those scenarios.

Ferol Vernon (19:04)

Right, yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I think the negative scans, there’s the one about something wrong with the retailer. ⁓ And then, know, Ricky, what else do you have on your list that we need to tell everybody about?

Ricci (19:37)

⁓ I think going into more detail on scams probably isn’t that useful because as we knock one down and authors get wise to it, another one’s gonna pop up. It’s kind of like whack-a-mole. So I like this idea of focusing more on the framework, right? Thinking about how is the email making you feel? What can you do to protect yourself? ⁓ And the other thing is that there are resources out there that can help you ⁓ determine

Ferol Vernon (19:46)

Yeah.

Ricci (20:04)

what scams are kind of trending right now. So Victoria Strauss has an amazing website called writers beware. And she tends to have her finger on the pulse of exactly, you know, what the trending scams are. So if you’re getting one of these emails, I would go straight to her website too and see if it’s there. And even if you’re not getting this email, these emails is probably worth going to her website. We’ll put the, the, address in the show notes so that you’re primed, right? So if you know,

Ferol Vernon (20:26)

Yeah, just to take a look.

Ricci (20:32)

hey, there’s a book club scam going on right now. And then you get that email, you’ll be like, yeah, Victoria told me about this. And you’re not gonna have to go through that whole emotional turmoil. And then the other thing that’s super helpful are these, you know, author groups, as if you’re part of a Facebook group or a community like Wide for the Win. There’s a lot of discussion there where authors are sharing their experiences as well. And so that’s where you can get educated and have other people help vet what’s, ⁓ you know, what’s true and what’s not.

Ferol Vernon (20:38)

I know it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. It’s like, you know, we’ve talked about at the beginning of the episode, you know, get another pair of eyes on it and whether that’s, you know, a friend or trusted colleague, whether that’s like your writing group or a writing partner, or some of these communities that you mentioned, you know, writers beware or wide for the win that are reputable and run by people who, you know, know what they’re doing and are trying to genuinely help the author community. It’s basically like, you know, once, once you get one of these things, look for another set of eyes and whether that’s online or in person, um, in your network.

That’s really a helpful thing for authors to do.

we’ve gone through a bunch of these scams. We’ve talked about the psychology and, you know, I think we can kind of close with sort of our checklist that we’ve talked about, which is, you know, get another set of eyes on it. If your gut is feeling something wrong, it probably is. And then, you know, doing your homework. And, you know, we mentioned a few resources, but Ricky, I know you’ve looked up a few other ones, so maybe you can kind of read those out so people know some other resources that can help them if they’re, you know, on the receiving end of one of these things, it feels too good to be true.

Ricci (22:05)

Yeah. And again, these will be in the show notes. We’ll probably do a blog post about this as well and put these resources right at the top. ⁓ but riders beware is the first one that one tends to be the most up to date. So it gets updated pretty frequently. ⁓ the author is guild also has a website where they have a blog and if any of this stuff is happening, they’ll post it there as well. ⁓ ally, ⁓ also has a watchdog desk. So, ⁓ when scams kind of, you know, start reaching critical pitch.

And they’ll put it put it there as well. So I think writers beware the author’s guild and the ally watchdog desk are all three really great resources where authors can go to find out what’s trending. And then as Farrell said, you’re always welcome to forward stuff to us at written word media and just say, Hey, I got this email. What do you think? Do you know if this is a scam or not? And we’ll be honest, you know, we’ll tell us, tell you what we think. If we know it’s a scam, because we do have authors reaching out to us.

Ferol Vernon (22:52)

Yes, we’ll take a look at it for you.

Ricci (23:05)

a fair amount or if we’re not sure, let you know that as well.

Ferol Vernon (23:10)

Okay, all right. Well, that’s the show for today. Thank you all for listening. Beware out there. Realize there’s people out there to help you. We’re on your side. ⁓ Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time.