Novelist Joe Dunthorne, like many authors, receives a constant stream of passionate fan mail. Almost every day, multi-paragraph emails arrive from readers in Barcelona, Frankfurt, Chicago, and Warsaw, with appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose, and Tricia Claxton. But these admirers are entirely fake, and their goal is to con him out of money. They promise to promote his work to their book clubs and reading communities, if only he transfers a few hundred dollars to cover costs.
The Rise of AI-Personalised Scams
In the age of generative AI, scam emails have achieved a new level of personalisation. Most writers receive a steady stream of these messages, which are often sophisticated enough to bypass spam filters. The painful question for authors is whether any real person would feel so strongly about their work. As one writer friend put it, the reason they know the emails are fake is because the senders have actually read all their books.
The AIs that help write these scams have indeed read all the books. Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn in compensation to authors whose copyrighted work was used to train their AI, Claude. In July, a group of publishers filed a lawsuit against Google for using “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history” to train their AI, Gemini. Writers know they are being manipulated by a version of themselves.
Engaging the Scammer
Dunthorne once received a gushing email from a fake Ottessa Moshfegh, the bestselling author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. After chatting, the fake Moshfegh claimed her new novel was “preoccupied with interior life” and suggested he explore her Amazon page to understand her work. Other writers have received similar messages from fake Donna Tartt and fake Sally Rooney.
Despite the correct response being to block and report, Dunthorne decided to see how far he could get with a scammer posing as the founder of the Berlin Book Club. He agreed to pay for her connections, insisting he could only send hard cash. After days of negotiation, she gave him a physical address in the Philippines. On Google Maps, he found a rural road with palm trees, a junk shop, an evangelical church, and a large building behind high white walls.
The Scam Farm Industry
The Philippines, along with Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, is heavily 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 trapped and forced to work as scammers. The building resembled a hybrid between a call centre and a prison, with rows of computers and tiny dorms. About half the workers were Filipino, while others were trafficked from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Rwanda. The bosses enjoyed a swimming pool next door, and another compound had its own brothel, karaoke suite, and torture room.
These scam compounds are a multi-billion dollar industry, run largely by Chinese crime syndicates who use violence and sexual abuse to keep workers in line. Scammers are encouraged to use generative AI and face masking apps for video calls. The focus is on “pig butchering”: long-term romance scams where people are tricked into investing in fake cryptocurrency. A seized compound in Cambodia resembled a TV studio, with costumes, wigs, and sets for filming different scams. One former scam compound manager told the BBC, “[It’s] all about exploiting emotion. You create a dream.”
Dunthorne did not send any cash. Instead, he shared the details with the country’s cybercrime agency. The problem, according to Winston Casio, spokesman for the presidential anti-organised crime commission, is that 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 the Bamban compound was shut down, it was discovered to be run by the local mayor, Alice Guo.
Dunthorne’s fantasy of unmasking the villain remains a fantasy. Now, when he receives fake fan mail, he understands the probable reality: someone frightened and far from home, sitting in a sound-insulated booth with phones on their desk, while their manager walks by with a taser at his hip.
