AUTHORS BEWARE! If you receive a flattering email about your book, it may be from an AI
I received a series of emails yesterday which I now know to be AI generated and suspect to be part of a phishing scam, so I’m flagging them up here as a warning to other authors who may be targeted in a similar way
The first email, headed “Your book Sky Boy really caught my eye!”, came via my website’s contact page and was supposedly from a woman called Jess Amon who had come across my book “Sky Boy”. I have written a book titled Skyboy and the email was very complimentary about it, but something felt off. There was nothing in the rest of the email that was specific to that book. And the email asked “Is this your first children’s book, or have you published others too?” which was odd, because it seemed unlikely that anyone could have found their way to my website’s contact page without noticing I had written other books.
3 minutes after the first email arrived I received a second email from Jess with the same text, but this time sent directly to my email address rather than via my site’s contact page. And 15 minutes after that, I received a third email, quoting the text from the first email. The text of the first email invited a response from me saying “Looking forward to hearing more about it!”, and this third email gave further encouragement by saying “i have some pretty interesting suggestions i know you’re going to love.”
The 3rd email also mentioned that they had tried to contact me through Facebook. When I checked Facebook I found the same message, sent 1 minute after the initial email. When I looked at the sender’s profile page, I saw that the account had been set up just 3 weeks ago and the only posts on it were a header image and a profile photo of a glamorous young woman.
A reverse image search of the profile photo has since revealed that the photo is actually of model Julia Knezevic and was taken from one of her Instagram posts.
It all felt dodgy, so I decided not to respond to any of the messages.
Then, later that day, a received another email via my web site’s contact page. This one was headed “Bringing Your Beautiful Books to Library Readers Everywhere” and was supposedly from a librarian and book advocate called “Jane Tactics”. This email included a reference to The Santa Trap, another of my books, and mentioned that I’d written “over 60 books”, which is a detail commonly found in my online bios on publishers’ websites. Again, there was nothing in the rest of the email that was specific to my books. This email was even more flattering about my books than the earlier one and said “I’ve added several of your titles to my resource list, and I would love to help get them into top library collections, where well-known librarians can recommend them to new readers and educators alike.” Like, the first email it was enticing me to respond.
By now I suspected that AI had been used to draft and possibly even send the emails as part of some sort of phishing scam, so I ran the text of both emails through an AI content detector. Both emails got an AI content rating of 100%. I hadn’t used the detector before, so to check that it didn’t give this rating to every text fed into it, I ran a couple of genuine emails I’d written myself through it as well and they both got an AI content rating of 0%.
It may be a coincidence, but it feels like all the emails were from the same source and that eager librarian Jane was put into play when I proved unresponsive to the glamorous Jess. Both Jess and Jane have a Gmail address.
I suspect that if, I’d responded to the emails, at some point in the subsequent correspondence I’d have been asked to provide money, personal details (to facilitate identity theft) or click on a link that downloaded malware to my computer.
So authors, be warned, if you receive a flattering message that heaps praise on your books and offers to promote your work, think twice before responding, and perhaps run the text through an AI content detector first!
