There’s no humble way to say it: I get a lot of fan mail. Almost every day, multi-paragraph emails arrive from passionate and well-informed readers in Barcelona and Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw.
They have appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton. Some of them are straightforward enthusiasts while others are more irreverent, like the one who signs off her messages “warm chaos”.
Some love the “deadpan genius” of my novels while others admire my nonfiction’s “moral courage”. What they all have in common, though, is that they are entirely fake and trying to con me out of money.
They promise to promote my work at their city-wide book clubs or spread the word among their reading communities, if only I transfer a few hundred dollars to cover costs.In the age of generative AI, scam emails have achieved a new level of personalisation. Most writers I know are receiving a steady stream of emails like this.
The messages are often sophisticated enough to bypass a spam filter and reach our inboxes, leaving us no option but to read them and ask the painful question: would any real, living person feel this strongly about my work? Or, as one writer friend put it, the reason I know they’re fake is because they’ve actually read all my books.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat makes it worse is that the AIs that help write these scams really have read all our books.
Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn in compensation to the thousands of authors whose copyrighted work they’d used to train their AI, Claude. In July, a group of publishers filed a lawsuit against Google for utilising “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history” in order to train their AI, Gemini.
So when writers receive these AI-assisted scam messages, we know we are being manipulated by a version of ourselves.A few months ago, for example, I received a gushing email from Ottessa Moshfegh. The bestselling, Booker-shortlisted author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation – to my mind one of the most potent voices in contemporary fiction – was taking time away from producing her inimitable prose to write me a fan letter.
I thanked her for getting in touch. We got chatting and I asked about her work-in-progress.
She said that her new novel was “preoccupied with interior life: how emotions register, how they fail to, and what that absence or excess does to identity over time”. I thought we were making a real connection when she said that, really, the best way to understand her work was to explore her Amazon page.
Sigh. Never meet your heroes.
Other writers have received similar messages from fake Donna Tartt and fake Sally Rooney. It must be strange for the real Moshfegh, Rooney and Tartt to know that their novels have been harvested by tech corporations in order to create the ghost versions of themselves who now haunt the inboxes of their peers.The correct response to all this is, of course, to simply report the email, block the sender and move on.
But there is a part of me that fantasises about dramatically unmasking the scammer, revealing the villain beneath. So when I received an email from the founder of the Berlin Book Club, I decided to see how far I could get.
I agreed that I did need help reaching new audiences. I was willing to pay for her connections and expertise.
Soon we started discussing payment methods. She wanted me to use CashApp or make a direct bank transfer but I was insistent that I could only send hard cash.
We went back and forth for a couple of days. I impressed on her that I had, at that very moment, 500 US dollars in crisp notes in an unmarked envelope and that I lived quite near the post office.
She finally relented and gave me a physical address. Neither of us commented on how unusual it was for the founder of the Berlin Book Club to have a postal address in the Philippines.
I went on Google Maps and was able to find the street in question, a rural two-lane road with palm trees, a junk shop, an evangelical church and a large building hidden behind high white walls.The Philippines – along with Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia – is one of the countries most affected by organised crime networks running industrial-scale “scam farms”. Last year, authorities raided a facility in Bamban, north of Manila, freeing nearly 700 people who had been trapped there and forced to work as scammers.
Inside the building, it resembled a hybrid between a call centre and a prison, rows upon rows of computers and green screens, and tiny dorms with bunk beds. About half of the workers were Filipino, while the others had been trafficked from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Rwanda, their documentation withheld.
The bosses, meanwhile, splashed around in the swimming pool next door. When another nearby compound was raided, they found it had its own brothel, karaoke suite and torture room.
Across south-east Asia, these scam compounds are a multi-billion dollar industry, run largely by Chinese crime syndicates who routinely use violence and sexual abuse to keep workers in line. With the enormous sums of stolen money flowing through the industry, some compounds are the size of small towns or, perhaps more accurately, labour camps – with thousands of workers.The scammers are encouraged to make use of the latest technology, not just generative AI but also face masking apps, so that they can conduct video calls wearing whatever face suits the task.
The big focus is on “pig butchering”: long-term romance scams where people are tricked into falling in love with a wealthy, glamorous foreigner who then advises them to invest in fake cryptocurrency. When a large scam compound in Cambodia was seized by the Thai army, they discovered that its facilities resembled a TV studio.
There were costumes, wigs and different sets for filming different scams. There was a fake Brazilian police station and a replica Vietnamese bank.
Scammers were trained to keep their targets on the hook for months, even years, inventing private and personalised narrative worlds through which they could drain all of the victim’s money. In an interview with the BBC, one former scam compound manager sounded not unlike a novelist when he described the process. “[It’s] all about exploiting emotion,” he said. “You create a dream.”For my part, I did not send any cash to the Philippines.
Instead I shared the details I’d received with the country’s cybercrime agency. Although, in the words of Winston Casio, the spokesman for the presidential anti-organised crime commission in the Philippines, the ongoing problem is that the criminals have “the financial capability to corrupt just about anybody in public office.
The amount of money they have is their potent tool against law enforcement.” When authorities shut down the Bamban compound, for example, they discovered that it was being run by Alice Guo, the local mayor. Similarly, the idea that AI companies might go out of their way to halt the criminal misuse of their technology seems just as doubtful – and for exactly the same reason.
It’s making them fantastically rich.All of which is to say that my fantasy of unmasking the villain was just that, a fantasy. At least now, when I receive fake fan mail, I can attempt to understand the probable reality behind the quirky name and upbeat tone.
On the other side of the screen, there is someone frightened and far from home, sitting in a sound-insulated booth with a dozen phones splayed out on their desk – while behind them their manager walks by, a taser at his hip.