alt.hn

8/22/2026 at 6:08:25 PM

I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

 https://rwwgreene.substack.com/p/i-set-a-trap-for-a-book-marketing

by rznicolet

8/23/2026 at 2:58:35 AM

I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems for whatever reason they have given up on SMS spam) from supposedly “cute” girls who he believed were just random young girls randomly sliding in to his DMs (this guy is in his mid-70s for the record).

It ended up that these girls would ask him for money, and he drained his savings accounts giving money to these “girls”, and even after running out of money, he kept believing these girls were real, they wanted to know him as a person, and that they just needed a little money to help out.

Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them. He would briefly relent, delete all his messaging apps these scammers were using to contact him, then he would feel lonely or what not, reinstall the apps, and resume contact with the scammers. It didn’t matter how many times we told him they weren’t real. It didn’t matter how much money he lost from these scammers pitching their wares to him.

He just stubbornly believed these were actual young girls who wanted to be his friend, no matter how many people told him they weren’t real, that he was just setting himself up to be scammed yet again.

I had to break contact with him. It just really angered me that this guy couldn’t believe something as basic as these girls actually being African/Southeast Asian/etc. scammers and not real people wanting to get to know him.

by strenholme

8/23/2026 at 3:24:07 AM

Most of the people live in the world they invented, where they are the protagonist, naturally young girls want to talk to the protagonist, even when he's 70. You'd have to dismantle their whole worldview to disabuse them of the protagonist idea, but by 70 it's often too far gone and requires facing a million mistakes they have conveniently swept under the rug with the fairytale they've told themselves.

by kvakerok

8/23/2026 at 8:52:20 PM

At that age a lot of people literally don't have the intellectual capacity to deal with this. Their brain is biologically atrophied due to illness, not exercising it anymore, not seeing or hearing well anymore (this has a huge impact), being socially isolated, etc.

They're not inventing a new world, they're not "conveniently" and consciously sweeping anything under the rug, they're not telling themselves a fairy tale. They're just losing much of the world they were living in and have to deal with what's left, holes and all. Why do you think old people are such easy targets for scams and fraud in general? Do you think only the body degrades with age?

If you're young enough to not have seen this in action ever, you'd be excused for not understanding at all what happens and for building such bad faith scenarios. Common sense and some light reading on the topic would have prevented that nonetheless.

by buran77

8/23/2026 at 7:45:10 AM

I recently saw a screenshot from Facebook of a mattress ad presented inline in a page load that had two conventionally attractive normal looking (fully clothed, not immodest at all) women on a mattress. Below it was somebody's grandpa writing a message basically to the effect of "hello sexy ladies I am (name) please chat with me".

It possibly could have been a bot, but I don't think bots commonly use profile pictures of dishevelled looking 75 year old men. Maybe for commenting on political agitprop, they do...

by walrus01

8/23/2026 at 2:24:28 PM

This reminded me of something that happened to me maybe 15 years ago. I was helping my Grandpa get his first smart phone. The saleswoman was maybe mid twenties and had a kinda hoarse voice. I was a little bit younger than her and I thought it was cute in its own way but of course I wasn't gonna say anything. She apologized for being hard to understand and my grandpa said no, it was fine, her voice was sexy.

Naturally I was mortified.

But I wonder how much of it is just "Fuck it, I'm an old man, I'm gonna let my creep flag fly."

by TomatoCo

8/24/2026 at 10:50:37 AM

And why in gods name shouldn't he give somebody a compliment?

You need to reign in your ageism sunshine.

by GJim

8/23/2026 at 3:13:18 AM

People often believe what they want to believe, even bending logic and facts towards their desire. We see it all the time in politics, up to the point people vote for literal criminals who want to rip them off and they see it, but they just want to believe it's all false.

by deepsun

8/23/2026 at 3:47:15 AM

Loneliness is hard. Maybe believing that it was real was the only thing keeping him going.

by danielheath

8/23/2026 at 9:33:32 AM

He didn't even believe it.

by Xmd5a

8/23/2026 at 6:57:26 AM

I of course don't know the person but are you sure he didn't have some mental problem and not just refusing to believe he was being played?

I knew a man and a woman who were in a couple and they were like this, they would believe anything that people told them because they were significantly mentally impaired and had some sort of psychological problem that was unclear. They could be taken advantage of by anyone.

It was pretty sad, in fact the best thing for them was if they were only slightly taken advantage of by people who then had an interest in taking care of them to keep the advantage taking going.

Like if someone drained this guy's back account halfway, but made sure no one else drained it, and came to see him every now and then sent him a nice greeting card. I know that sounds pretty weird to claim but I saw it with this couple, they were essentially protected and controlled by the people who took a little long term advantage, basically because the American system just lets you lose everything and go live on the streets and die if you can't take care of yourself, but if people who need a place to stay come stay with you and make sure your money gets spent on food for everyone they're actually better off. It was sad to see but also the best possible outcome given the miserable situation for them.

Anyway, these people were not fixable by being talked to, and it wasn't because they had spent so many years deluding themselves. It was because they had real problems that meant they could never understand some things.

by bryanrasmussen

8/23/2026 at 11:31:02 AM

!!SPOILER ALERT!! in Shutter Island:

When he realizes he's committed a terrible crime, the next day he goes back to believing he's a US marshal. His last words:

- this place makes me wonder...

+ Yeah, what's that, boss?

- Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?

This is a sad reality of life, that leads many, to choose a fantasy over reality. How many of us consistently avoid this trap?

by aljgz

8/23/2026 at 7:29:04 AM

reddit.com/r/scams/ has numerous and varied reports of these from the point of view of (usually) a concerned family member. It's a real plague on society. Older people who are inclined to be trusting, lonely, isolated or those with diminished mental faculties need to be extensively warned about this. Despite warnings many still engage.

by walrus01

8/23/2026 at 6:06:06 PM

need to set up better scams bilking grandad out of money and funneling to a trust for his grandkids

by darepublic

8/23/2026 at 7:34:51 PM

> Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them.

Given he had family, one remedy would have been to establish a guardianship/conservatorship on the basis of mental/financial incompetence.

by mistersquid

8/23/2026 at 8:19:15 AM

Why not see this as him buying company? Then you'll understand that loneliness is so hard, that most people would pay a lot of money to ease it.

Ironically, instead of breaking contact, maybe the solution would have been to be there for him more.

by stavros

8/23/2026 at 7:02:08 AM

Yes it's infuriating to see someone you care about fall for an obvious scam, yet... I don't know... If it's his money and it makes him happy, or a little less sad, a little less lonely... Why not...

by bambax

8/23/2026 at 7:15:23 AM

You'd give away all your money to feel a little bit less sad?

by walthamstow

8/23/2026 at 12:20:21 PM

I can’t tell if you’re joking but people do that all the time, every day. It might be alcohol, strippers, or just random stuff they don’t really need.

If this sounds surprising to you then probably you have enough money that you don’t need to give all of it away to be less sad.

by nkrisc

8/23/2026 at 12:31:34 PM

In this thread we're talking about people who have life savings to be scammed out of. I'd say it's probably not an everyday thing that people empty their life savings and blow it all on Temu and strippers.

by walthamstow

8/23/2026 at 7:19:44 AM

Eventually yes. Just comes to degree. But I do very often spend money to feel that little bit sad. Be it food or snacks or some mostly useless junk I think I need.

by Ekaros

8/23/2026 at 8:55:14 AM

If you think about it, the only reason we ever spend money, is to feel a little bit less sad.

by bambax

8/23/2026 at 10:40:58 AM

When you put it like that it doesn't sound like the worst idea.

by shiandow

8/23/2026 at 11:07:09 AM

It sounds terrible. You used to be sad, now you're still sad and you're destitute too

by walthamstow

8/23/2026 at 11:40:10 AM

But less sad!

Honestly the main problem is one of efficiency not whether buying happiness with money is a bad idea. Being less sad is more important than having money, but you do need to plan ahead so you don't run out too quickly.

by shiandow

8/23/2026 at 12:25:37 PM

For some people that’s the best they can hope for.

by nkrisc

8/23/2026 at 10:38:06 AM

Because the same techniques are used in the media and politics to get believe and vote for things that aren't true, by people who will not just scam money from the victims in many different ways, but do far worse things to other innocents.

We don't need voter id or age verification laws, we need laws that make any form of deliberate online deception for profit a crime punishable by jail time.

by TheOtherHobbes

8/24/2026 at 2:05:56 PM

[dead]

by cineticdaffodil

12/8/2025 at 9:36:45 PM

Half my spam folder is currently from the same group of people, with similar sales pitches, though one also promised 25 five star Amazon reviews for $200 which is scary if true. The whole blog post just about sums up an indie writers journey, having to become a reluctant marketing person, and fighting the algorithm for recognition; the meme nailed it.

Luckily I came to realise after my first book that writing was not about the sales (though that was the starting goal), but about finally putting all my ideas into a bunch of characters and having them live the life and fantasies I never could in a world I created. I got an email out of the blue this week from somebody who read my free sci-fi novel and liked it, such small things really makes the journey worth it.

by boznz

8/23/2026 at 4:32:32 AM

It's interesting how we seem to go through a cycle.

a) There's a gate-keeper who picks winners, and charges money. Maybe book publising, maybe academic papers, maybe music - whatever.

b) producers complain - these parasites are sucking all the money out the ecosystem, and adding no value. We need to bypass the gate-keepers. Go to market directly.

c) The "indie" scene becomes legit. Barriers to entry drop. Consumers can find creators directly. There's no middle man.

d) The indie scene bcomes popular. Everyone can publish an academc paper, or record a song, or write a book. (Of course 99% of it is rubbish, because, well, most of everything we create is rubbish)

e) along come the "guides" - folks who'll teach, or promote, or review or whatever. Most of that is of (let's be generous) "marginal quality" - assuming it's not just an outright scam (which it probably is.)

Turns out those gatekeepers were indeed providing something of value. But because they rejected almost everyone, and because they charged real money, they were disliked by creator and consumer alike. ah well...

Ultimately of course, for the 99% of us, the fun is in the creation not the result. There's no money in creating (and for the 99% never has been). Enjoy the process - if someone likes it, great. Will you make our living doing this? Almost certainly not.

by bruce511

8/23/2026 at 6:04:29 PM

You skipped a step between d) and e) - the stealth reimposition of gatekeepers under the guise of sorting through the crap. On the Internet, this took the form of "recommendation algorithms". The problem with a recommendation algorithm is that, while it is sold as "finding choices you wouldn't have known about", what it's really doing is narrowing the menu. It has to be, because of how the data flow works:

1. Obtain data on what kinds of people enjoy which books, movies, music, etc

2. Train a neural network to predict the sampled distribution. Because that distribution already contains a lot of data for the most popular works, and less for less other works, the model is trained with a bias for already popular works. Conversely, less-popular or niche works may be forgotten completely by the model.

3. Deploy the model. Because the model has a bias to predict certain already-popular works, it will recommend them more often, while the ones with little data in the set are recommended less. This changes the true distribution of the data.

4. Repeat. Take new sampled data from modified distribution and train a new model on that distribution.

As a result of applying this cycle multiple times, the tails drop out. People don't watch or read niche works, so they get forgotten. This is ostensibly fixable, you could bias the model towards less well-known works, but it's more profitable to just make people pay to boost their posts. Bonus points: people who pay to boost are also polluting the model with a bunch of negative data about their work, so they are self-selecting into a class of easy marks who don't get recommended because they keep paying to show in front of people who don't want it.

by kmeisthax

8/24/2026 at 4:55:48 PM

> Turns out those gatekeepers were indeed providing something of value.

you missed step that proves or indicates that

by matkoniecz

8/23/2026 at 8:51:06 PM

I'm sorry I only gave you 4 stars on Goodreads. I mostly only ever give 4 stars. But I second the out of the blue e-mail.

For those wondering what book. Here is the trilogy. Free for download: https://rodyne.com/?p=1252

by jorgen123

8/23/2026 at 7:25:55 AM

Replying to the first-ever email was really just making the problem worse for the author. Exacerbated by continuing to engage.

One of the great things about SMTP and email is that a spammer can really never be sure whether a person opened or read an email. Many SMTP will silently accept emails and not inform the sender or auto-generate a reject bounce that a recipient's address doesn't even exist. Unless the reader opens an email and loads some active html content, image, 1x1 px pixel, etc, the sender can never know.

When you start responding with hand crafted emails back to a spam farm all you've done is successfully mark your email address as "there is a live human reading this and they will reply" in some spammer's database.

by walrus01

8/23/2026 at 1:38:33 AM

> In writing this article, Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for structure, data organization, and feedback.

yeah, it was quite visible in style (in parts that I bothered to read)

by matkoniecz

8/23/2026 at 4:17:56 AM

Yep could tell something was off. Why does an author feel the need to use AI, isn't that their craft?

by RolandFlicket

8/24/2026 at 3:04:58 PM

Ask a software engineer.

by margalabargala

8/23/2026 at 3:12:56 AM

i also tapped out quickly. how many times can you describe the same thing?

Claude: "Hold my beer."

by leeoniya

8/23/2026 at 7:21:35 AM

I recognise these scammers. I run a website for a small community group which just has a bit of information about them which has a contact us page with minimal protection. It comes in waves the language is very similar offering SEO and suchlike. I don't allow any of that through to the community because they are mostly non-technical and somebody will no doubt reply.

This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.

by clort

8/23/2026 at 1:34:41 AM

> each one arriving within hours despite my repeated, polite “no thank you” responses

why anyone would respond to spammers, if they recognize them as spammers? And want them to stop spamming?

by matkoniecz

8/23/2026 at 1:37:11 AM

Beat me to it. Why isn’t every unsolicited pitch without an unsubscribe link immediately blocked/marked as spam?

by ilamont

8/23/2026 at 2:41:41 PM

Is the presence of an unsubscribe link a useful signal? I presume that just marks your email address as active in the spammer's database.

by itintheory

8/23/2026 at 5:22:00 PM

I think so too and have a funny conunndrum: I frequently get emails from some "Relations management" companies that they are including my contacts in a catalogue to sell to clients. I can opt out by clicking a link.

So either I click and it may delete me, or it will confirm my address is real. I err on the side of not clicking, but I'm sure many less technically minded colleagues make the click.

by goobatrooba

8/23/2026 at 1:57:39 AM

Not to mention the obviously unrelated-to-publishing, dodgy sounding email addresses. Red flag #1 where only a single red flag is needed to discard it.

Having said that, less technically minded people, as authors may be, may not even notice that.

by BLKNSLVR

8/23/2026 at 2:58:39 AM

Many people don’t even know that Outlook can still show the source email address because it shows you the name instead.

by bombcar

8/24/2026 at 4:48:49 PM

I mark as spam also ones with unsubscribe link.

by matkoniecz

8/23/2026 at 7:25:00 AM

Because he decided to write an investigation article and wanted to see what would happen.

I don't think he replies to all spam emails.

by tdrgabi

8/24/2026 at 4:48:24 PM

According to claimed timeline he decided to do it later. At that stage responding to spammers makes sense.

by matkoniecz

8/23/2026 at 5:08:13 AM

It's sad that there are people who are creative enough to pull this off who choose to participate in petty scams instead of applying their ai and persuasion skills to something more useful.

by klntsky

8/23/2026 at 6:58:52 AM

This seems to be limited to the English publishing world, at least for now? I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety (I was interviewed on national public radio in France about it) and didn't receive any one of those scam emails. -- Not "few": zero.

by bambax

8/23/2026 at 7:37:58 PM

> I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety […].

Was it bad or scandalous, or did you mean “renown” instead of “notoriety”?

by mistersquid

8/23/2026 at 9:04:57 PM

Ah, thanks for pointing it out. "Notoriété" doesn't have any bad connotation in French, but apparently it does in English. The more you know! I meant renown.

by bambax

8/23/2026 at 6:10:54 PM

Perhaps the scam hasn't jumped cultural / linguistic borders yet. Pig butchering scams used to be almost exclusively targeted at Chinese users until China kicked out the Triads. The Triads then set up slave camps in Myanmar and started targeting English-speaking users instead.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the book marketing scammers are one or two groups of people that just haven't thought to target French authors yet. But basically any creative endeavor in the Anglosphere has its own attendant scammer ecosystem.

Or who knows, maybe the Francosphere just doesn't have the algorithmic gatekeepers the Anglosphere has.

by kmeisthax

8/23/2026 at 1:44:10 AM

A trend that’s leading to more victims is the wave of boomer retirements. Every year there are millions of new 60 and 70 somethings with lots of time on their hands, many of them loaded to the gills and keen to write that novel/memoir/children’s book they’ve been thinking about for years. They are seldom aware of publishing industry requirements, and may be easily swayed by convincing email pitches, “authentic” social media personalities, or YouTube scammers.

by ilamont

8/23/2026 at 9:45:24 AM

> Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong.

What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.

by liendolucas

8/23/2026 at 6:27:04 PM

Book publishers have spent the last few decades making a profit off of managing the decline of their entire field of endeavor. Every opportunity to expand the medium was thrown out, and every big fad wound up hurting rather than helping. For example, you know that "generation of readers" a certain YA book supposedly made? What it actually did was destroy graded readers because publishers thought YA books had to go upmarket. The publishing industry is just chock full of short-sighted moves like this.

If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction.

Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling.

[0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness.

[1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.

by kmeisthax

8/23/2026 at 4:04:17 AM

So wait, what was the trap?

by ant6n

8/23/2026 at 5:20:01 PM

> Some I’d deleted without recording. Some had been auto-deleted from spam after thirty days. Some I’d forgotten about before I started keeping systematic track.

> I wasn’t being marketed to. I was being carpet-bombed.

Three in a row directly followed by a juxtaposition containing a weird metaphor (shouldn't it be "bombarded" instead of "carpet-bombed"?)

Good luck selling books.

by stephbook

8/23/2026 at 5:22:38 PM

“No …, no …, just …”

And more AI-isms. I think we finally found ground zero: the original author whose work was used to train the LLMs.

by tverbeure

8/24/2026 at 4:59:21 PM

In footer they admit to "Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for structure, data organization, and feedback"

presumably it stands for "I asked LLM to write it for me"

by matkoniecz

8/23/2026 at 6:21:28 PM

[flagged]

by evidaxis