Writer Beware

My agent had a really nasty thing happen to her online. A scammer used her name and the agency's name to pretend to be offering representation and to scam money out of people:

https://accrispin.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-impersonation-game.html

Someone pointed out it's a little like the scammers who pretend to be the IRS to get personal information.

Pretending to be a real agent or agency is a long-standing scammer tradition, and there's also some cases of scammers who weren't doing it for money, just for the fun of fooling people and ruining their hopes. There was a case on Writer Beware several years ago of a scammer who pretended to be a literary agent in the UK for a dozen or so writers, met some of them in person, had an entire (sockpuppeted) agency staff, but never asked for money, they seemed to be doing it just for fun. To cap it off, they used another sockpuppet to report themselves to Writer Beware, I guess for the fun of being investigated and found out, and watching their victims realize they had been wasting their time for years.

Another horrific one was really personal. A young woman who had talked a lot about her writing and submissions and attempts to query agents on her blog got a letter (and possibly some emails) supposedly from a major lit agency (where she had actually submitted a manuscript) telling her they had not only agreed to represent her but had already sold the book for some large amount. She believed it for a bit, but fortunately people on her blog knew enough to tell her this was wrong. There was no money involved in this either, someone just wanted to fool this woman long enough for her to post about it on her blog and be called a liar, and to enjoy her disappointment, I guess.

comments