The Book Club Scam

I have written earlier about the many vulnerabilities we face living more and more of our lives in digital spaces. Most of those vulnerabilities are due to inherent weaknesses in the systems—and in the speed with which we engage with those systems—which can be exploited by scammers and hackers. But in the age of AI, scammers are increasingly able to fine-tune their approach. Broadly this is termed spear phishing or targeted phishing, to distinguish it from the blunt instrument of the "Nigerian Prince" email scams of the 90s and early 2000s. These scams will only get more precise, more personal, and harder to spot as time goes on. 

For now, they are still pretty clumsy. But their increasingly personalized nature makes them more dangerous. A relatively new such scam targeting scholarly authors can be dangerous nonetheless. It is an individualized invitation designed to prey on what may be the author's greatest vulnerability: the fond hope that someone might be interested in our books.

We could call this vanity, I suppose, but if so it is the vanity common to all authors since long before the invention of the printing press. We write for an audience. When, after publishing our work, that audience does not materialize, it leaves behind a hole forever waiting to be filled—the missing echo of saying "I love you" to a partner who does not respond. For scholarly authors, this unrequited love letter is a heartbreakingly common occurrence. Thus we find ourselves particularly vulnerable to scams that promise the longed-for response. 

Fifteen years ago, I published a book titled The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, detailing the attempts to create in print in 18th-century America a virtual version of the coffee house culture of London. Unlike the commercial magazine to follow in the 19th century, these magazines were doomed to be financial failures from the start, and yet many of the most pragmatic men and women of the age devoted unremunerated time and resources to publishing them. My book was an attempt to understand why.

I remain proud of the book, which is not always the case when I look back on writing from years past. But like the periodical publishers, editors, and authors who were my topic, I did not write it in the expectation of significant attention. It was written with an audience of periodical scholars and media historians in mind, and that it found a niche audience (and a publisher willing to invest in it) was all I could have asked for.

So, imagine my surprise when I received an email last week inviting me to participate in a book club conversation about this book. I received the first early in the work week, and set it aside to return to later. By the end of the week I had received three different appeals, of rapidly degenerating quality.

Let's focus on the first, because 1) it is well written and 2) it is from what appears to be a real person and a real online book club. (I will change the name of the individual and the club here to avoid adding to the challenges they are likely already facing). It opens:

My name is ___, and I organize the ___Book Club, a reading community of around 80–100 members who value slow, reflective reading and thoughtful discussion. What makes our group unique is the way our members engage deeply with books that explore literary culture, media history, publishing, communication, and the evolution of public discourse.

Recently, your book, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, came to our attention, particularly in the way it appears to examine the development of early magazine culture and its influence on literary life, readership, and public conversation in America. The effort to connect periodical culture with broader intellectual and social transformation felt especially compelling to our group.

This was as far as I got when this arrived a week ago. I spend a lot of time on the look out for scams, but even so I could not help but be flattered at the idea that someone from outside academia might have an interest in discussing my book. A quick search on the Internet revealed that the club and the individual were real, although I was immediately struck by the discrepancy between the membership announced in the email (80-100) and that found at the club's online meetup.com page (1750). 

The competition between the sound of alarm bells and the desire to have one's work seen is always fraught, and few are as vulnerable as humanities professors. We put many lonely years into books which count their readership in the low hundreds, if we are lucky. We comfort ourselves that we are not writing for immediate attention, but for the long scholarly conversation which unfolds across decades and generations. After all, we are the inheritors of the academic tradition extending back to medieval monasteries in which monks toiled in isolation copying manuscripts to preserve knowledge from the ravages of time and human history. 

Or at least, so we tell ourselves. But there remains that small voice that wonders what it would be like to have a "crossover," to be seen from outside the cloister. We all have colleagues who have been so blessed, and while we are convinced we do not seek it ourselves it is hard not to wonder what it would be like to have one's work reviewed or discussed in mainstream circles.

Strangely, this was not the first time The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture had been used as unlikely bait in an unlikely honeytrap. Shortly after it was published in 2012, I arrived at my office to find a message waiting for me on my answering machine (yes, an actual answering machine, from back in the days when we had actual landlines in university offices). The caller expressed enthusiasm about the book and said he was a movie producer eager to turn it into a "Hollywood film." It was absurd, of course, and the message was deleted without hesitation (I learned later that several colleagues had received similar calls about movie adaptations of even less likely books). But that was, relative to today, an analog age—one without AI to summarize the contents of a scholarly book and, more important, without the immediacy of email as a mechanism for response. 

So it is fortunate, perhaps, that by the time the work week wound down and I found time to read the whole of the email from this London bookclub, I had received two other versions of the same appeal. Because, frankly, the first letter was only more convincing as it continued:

Many of our members are drawn to works that investigate print culture, literary history, media evolution, communication networks, and the relationship between publishing and democratic discourse. Your work seems closely aligned with those interests, especially in the way it encourages readers to think critically about how magazines shaped communities of readers, circulated ideas, and influenced cultural identity.

One aspect that especially stood out to me was the apparent emphasis your work places on magazines as dynamic social and intellectual spaces. The idea that periodicals served not merely as containers for writing, but as engines of conversation, debate, and literary experimentation feels both intellectually engaging and historically rich.

I also appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of the work. The way literary studies, media history, publishing history, cultural analysis, and communication studies appear to intersect within the book seems likely to generate especially thoughtful discussion within our group.

Be still my heart...

A second one arrived from a real online book club dedicated to design and user experience. Some of their recent reads have included Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior and Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services—not exactly a reading group likely to take interest in my book. The email was addressed from the real organizer of the group, but using a false gmail address—and with her first name misspelled ("Liamh" as opposed to "Niamh").

But attention to such details is hard to maintain when the email suggests such keen interest in the things I find so very interesting:

I was especially drawn to the way your work examines early American literature, the history of popular print media, and the cultural role magazines played in shaping literary and public life.

Our members include readers who are deeply interested in literary history, media studies, publishing culture, graphic narrative, and the relationship between communication technologies and social change. Your work offers a thoughtful and historically grounded perspective on how magazines influenced reading practices, public conversation, cultural identity, and the evolution of literary expression in early America.

What stood out in particular is the way The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture appears to illuminate the relationship between print media and cultural formation, encouraging readers to think more carefully about how magazines shaped public imagination, literary communities, and the circulation of ideas within a developing national culture. The exploration of popular print and narrative culture invites reflection on how media forms influence intellectual life, artistic experimentation, and democratic discourse across historical periods. That perspective resonates strongly with the kinds of discussions our community values.

I also found your broader scholarship on early American literature and graphic narrative studies especially compelling, particularly in how it contributes to deeper understanding of storytelling, media evolution, and the cultural history of reading and publication.

This of course is an entirely AI generated summary of my book. Provided with a prompt encouraging a tone of earnest and attentive flattery and funneled through a fixed template, a scamming operation can generate hundreds of these a day. The template for the above looks something like this:

I am writing in connection with {title of book}.I was especially drawn to the way your work examines {topic of book}.Our members include readers who are deeply interested in {audience for book}. Your work offers a {praise for book}. What stood out in particular is the way {title of book} appears to illuminate {contribution of the book}. That perspective resonates strongly with the kinds of discussions our community values.I also found your broader scholarship on {other areas of research by author}, particularly in how it contributes to deeper understanding of {overall summary of author's topics of research}.

Aside from being a reminder to be on the look out for AI scams, this is also a useful reminder of how and why AI itself is so compelling and so dangerous. A while back I referred to AI as a card sharp, a hustler—processing vast amounts of data through millions of layers, each governed by its own weights and functions, all in order to produce on the other end the most compelling response to any question you ask of it.

I'll discuss in more detail in a future post the processes whereby LLMs are motivated towards what many have noticed to be a constitutional tendency towards sycophancy. In some ways, however, such a characterization is a bit harsh, given that these models are trained by humans to want to provide the answers humans want to receive.

The core mechanism is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and its more recent variants (such as RLAIF, Constitutional AI, DPO). After a base model is pre-trained on text prediction, it is fine-tuned as human (or AI) raters compare two model outputs, pick the one they prefer, and a reward model is trained to predict those preferences. The language model is then optimized to produce outputs the reward model scores highly. So there is, quite literally, a reward signal that shapes the desire to please, as the gradient updates during training systematically push it toward outputs that approval-giving humans (or models trained on their approval) rated higher.

In the hands of con artists spear phishing professors (or other apples in a barrel), this is a powerful tool. The scammers are deploying the tendency baked into the models to produce what is asked—in this case, flattering and attentive assessments of an individual author's work.

A year ago, AI was pretty terrible at this kind of summary. Today the frontier models are very good and getting better at a rapid clip. This is a deadly weapon to point at humans at a time when various forces conspire to make so many feel unseen and unheard—and by no means only authors of obscure scholarly monographs. 

As the science fiction novelist John Scalzi wrote in November, authors started receiving a flood of emails promising promotion of their work, often referencing books over a decade old, with an eventual ask of a couple hundred dollars in "administrative fees." Within a few months, word had spread across the Internet to published (and self-published) literary and genre fiction authors regarding the scam. 

The fake book club or featured author *scam** was documented in detail by Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware. It follows a pattern familiar in broad strokes to most scams of this kind:

1. Target acquisition. With AI assistance, scammers scrape Amazon, Goodreads, and similar sites to harvest author names, book titles, and a few hooks. This is why my obscure academic title gets the same pitch as would a current self-help bestseller. Even as the scammers have moved on to academic authors who they hope will be innocent to the scam, they have done little to change the formula. One of my email solicitations, this one purporting to be from an Istanbul book club, even left in the literal placeholder string {Specific Hook} unspecified. It is hard to blame them, since truly such a hook would be hard to come up with.
2. The opener. A flattering, overwritten email from a Gmail address, claiming to represent a curated book club with somewhere between 80 and several thousand "thoughtful members." Strauss notes that some of these clubs don't exist online, while others impersonate real Meetup.com groups, and the emails are personalized via AI scraping of sites like Amazon. The tone leans heavily on words like thoughtful, reflective, meaningful, curated, slow reading, deep engagement.
3. The pivot. If I were to have replied with interest, the second or third email would introduce the fee. Spot or participation fees typically run from about $55 to $350, requested via PayPal friends-and-family (irreversible) or through Upwork contracts to third parties in Nigeria. Sometimes there's a secondary upsell to a "professional designer" who will produce an "Author Codex Banner" or trailer—AI-generated slop charged at premium rates. Some variants ask you to "tip" the reviewers $20 each. 
4. The deliverable. Most likely nothing, or a perfunctory AI-generated "review" posted to a thrown-together Instagram account or website. Reviews have been documented as bizarre constructions of random sentences from the book mixed with lines stolen from legitimate reviews. 

Looking at my three (as of this writing) as a set, the family resemblance is unmistakable. But there are also some interesting differences.

The Istanbul one is the laziest, and not only because of the unfilled "specific hook." It's salutation greets me as "Hi The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture," and there are other signs of a bot misfiring. On the other hand, this one is the most honest, in that it specifies that it is to be a commercial enterprise working to promote books through its book "platform." The other two are the more polished "soft" variant, heavy on the flattery with no mention of any potential financial ask down the road. 

The advice of course is clear: do not respond. Replying confirms a live address and invites escalation. Report it as phishing and block the address. This is not the attention you are looking for.

I can't help but wonder at the strange attraction of scammers to my labor-of-love book. I have other titles that have garnered more attention, and yet none but this one has ever been the object of attention of scammers and con artists. Perhaps the arcane subject matter conjures pictures of a vulnerable old antiquarian scouring the reviews for some interest, however belated, in that book he wrote about 18th-century magazines? 

Or was it the subject of the book—its interest in print, anonymity, and the ideal of early republican civic virtue? Are the scammers ridiculing my admiration for the posture of selflessness which these anonymous editors and authors maintain—exposing the vanity of all such attempts, both theirs and mine?

Of course, even to ask such questions is to grant to the scammers and the tools they use intention and attention far beyond what they have to spare. The appeals may look carefully researched and personalized, but that is the illusion that AI grants to everything it generates. And on the other side of these emails sits, almost certainly, a human being forced by overseers to generate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such appeals a day in the hopes of successfully spear phishing just one. 

Tragically, it is the often-indentured worker at the scam compounds from which so many of these originate who desperately needs our attention, to meet quotas, to avoid punishment, to one day be able to return home. All of which reminds us that the vast digital machinery of the 21st century built to generate and capture attention—or the illusion of attention, of being seen—is a trap from which we all must escape. 

In the meantime, there is something to be said for scholarly authors taking comfort in the model of the 18th-century periodical authors who wrote for an audience that did not yet exist. No doubt, they too dreamed of a crossover hit (which for them would have involved seeing their work reprinted on the other side of the Atlantic). But this was an age when each piece of type was set by hand, and the presses had not changed considerably since the 15th century. It was a time when few Americans could spare the money or the time to read the periodicals so painstakingly printed. The attention these writers and editors sought lay always in an imagined future generation, one that would have the time and resources to appreciate what an earlier age had preserved. 

There has been some excellent reporting and analysis of contemporary global scam empires and the compounds that fuel them. Some recommended reads: 

• Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, and Mark Bo Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds (Verso, 2025)
• Alexander Clapp, "Pig Butchering," London Review of Books (November 6, 2025)
• Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (2023) 
• Andy Greenberg, "He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive," Wired (January 27, 2026)