Eight years of dedication were poured into the pages of Angel of Aleppo, Jon Cocks’ debut historical novel. Inspired by his wife’s grandmother, a survivor of the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century, it was a labour of love, distilled from thousands of hours of research and oral testimony.
The retired South Australian high school teacher’s project carried the weight of family history and historical truth. It was precisely this emotional gravity that rendered him vulnerable.
The new wave of artificial intelligence-fuelled publishing fraud that began saturating global markets last year lifts directly from the lonely hearts playbook. Rogue publishing schemes – most operating out of south Asia, the Philippines and Nigeria – have become the new romance scams, substituting the promise of true love for the dream of literary recognition.
In six months Cocks has lost almost A$10,000.
It wasn’t vacuous adulation that hooked him but the political and moral significance the solicitations attributed to his work. The pitches argued that his years of emotional investment deserved a global audience befitting a historically vital narrative; that an advanced marketing campaign would deliver his message to the world.
“And here’s me stupid enough to think these people were for real,” he says. “It still makes me angry – I rant for a bit, then I calm down again. I’m 70, I don’t want to bring on an episode.”
The new age of scams
Literary deception is not a new phenomenon; it existed long before the invention of the modern printing press in the 1400s – the Catholic church had been citing forged papal letters and decrees for 600 years. Enormous financial gain has been the motive behind more contemporary deceptions. The fake 1970s “authorised autobiography” of the billionaire recluse Howard Hughes netted its creator a writer’s fee of more than US$765,000 (US$5m today) and 17 months in jail.
It was a sum dwarfed a decade later by the fake Hitler diaries, bought for 9.3m marks (more than US$11m today) and earning a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence for their creator.
But AI technology has triggered a pandemic of scams in the publishing world, where the roles of writer as perpetrator and publisher as patsy have been reversed.
While even distinguished authors are being targeted in increasingly sophisticated schemes, self-published authors are fraudsters’ primary prey. In 2023 the number of self-published books topped 2.6m, compared with 563,000 traditionally published titles.
AI can trawl through tens of millions of titles, identifying low-selling authors and generating personalised solicitations at unprecedented speed.
“There have always been scams but they have been relatively easy to identify,” says a US-based intellectual property attorney, Kathryn Goldman, who founded Baltimore’s Creative Law Center.
“But with AI, it has absolutely exploded. It’s easy to set up these websites. It’s easy to create fake people. It’s easy to create fake videos … New authors just don’t have that level of sophistication to keep up with the scams that are now out there.”
The courtship begins with praise. Via Facebook ads and unsolicited emails, guarantees are made to transform a self-published work into a bestseller. Once the author is tethered, the final demand drops: pay thousands for a “marketing package” or the dream dies.
The scale of these operations is massive, says Angela Hoy, the founder of the longest-running US website for freelance writers, Writers Weekly. “In the past year, we’ve identified more than 2,500 scam publishers,” she says.
The core deception involves selling authors meaningless services, such as “guaranteed bestseller” status, charging thousands for vanity media placements like low-viewership interviews or book fair booth displays that don’t exist, and procuring positive reviews on major retailer sites – illegal in many jurisdictions, including Australia.
Writers have paid thousands for a 15-second spot on a Times Square billboard – only to find that their book cover has been poorly Photoshopped on to a stock image.
Australian writers – eager to crack the US market but ignorant of how it works – can be duped into paying thousands more for worthless “book returns insurance” and fictitious “author’s licenses”.
Among the more ambitious claims is access to Hollywood producers and streaming giants. In a typical book-to-film scam, a single fraudster assumes three personas: literary agent, movie executive and screenwriter. The fake agent hooks the author with flattery, then introduces a fake executive who demands a professional screenplay, conning the victim into paying thousands to a fake screenwriter for a script that never materialises.
The losses Writers Weekly records from each victim range from about $5,000 to $20,000. The book-to-film deals have cost some writers as much as $100,000.
Last year an FBI investigation led to the arrest of three people involved in a $44m scam that defrauded more than 800 elderly authors by promising fake film deals.
“Fraud remains one of the most devastating violations the FBI works [on] due to the number of victims and staggering amount of loss,” said an FBI special agent, Stacey Moy.
Romance fraudsters of old were “long-con” scammers, requiring an investment of months, sometimes years, to cultivate a victim’s trust. AI has created a scam book marketing industry that allows it to target vast numbers of hopeful authors simultaneously. The grooming process is now fully automated.
‘Extortion demands’
The Australian Society of Authors issued its first warning to Australian writers about the emergence of AI-generated fraud in October, noting that technological advances were giving fraudsters the capacity to deliver personalised, realistic and targeted solicitations.
“Gone are the days where scams were easily identifiable by spelling errors, strange formatting, and impersonal salutations,” the warning said.
A month later Guardian Australia reported on suspected fraudulent websites luring first-time writers with promises of publication for an upfront fee. Within 24 hours, all four sites identified – Melbourne Book Publisher, First Page Press, Aussie Book Publisher and Oz Book Publishers – had been taken down.
The Guardian has uncovered nine more suspicious sites, although the number is probably much larger. Many share common characteristics: a parent company or owner based in Pakistan and domain registration in Iceland – more specifically, the address of Kalkofnsvegur 2, Reykjavik, a building that houses an H&M outlet and the world’s only penis museum.
It is also the registered address of Withheld for Privacy, a generic placeholder name used in public Whois records by domain registrars to comply with privacy regulations. It is used legitimately by individuals seeking to protect their personal information but also by bad actors trying to conceal their true identities.
A US author and the founder of the website Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss, has been tracking publishing scam sites since 2018. In the past three months she has collected stories from more than 200 victims and potential victims.
“The scams do sometimes publish books, partly in order to look legit, but also to keep writers on side so they can be pressured to buy additional marketing services or targeted for more serious fraud,” she says.
Most frequent are book order scams, in which writers are told there are bulk orders but they have to pay for printing.
“I’ve also seen what amounts to extortion demands – a scammer has removed an author’s book from sale until the author pays thousands, supposedly to meet ‘Amazon’s publishing standards’,” she says.
Another writer was told that Amazon required authors to “have a trademark in place” to keep books on sale – a service the scammer was happy to provide for a few thousand dollars.
The cost of a dream
One memory still carries a sharp, sweet clarity for Cocks. The proof copy of Angel of Aleppo had just been hand-delivered to his home. His wife, Lilet, snapped a picture of the first-time author posing with his creation, a smile stretched wide across his face.
“I thought, this is it,” he says. “Here it is – my message to an Australia that still will not recognise what happened a century ago.” Angel of Aleppo was more than a vanity project. It was Cocks’ testament to the Armenian diaspora, a plea for recognition of the 1915-22 genocide – an event successive Australian governments have refused to formally recognise.
While teaching teenagers the power of words stood Cocks in good stead to craft an absorbing tale, he admits to zero knowledge of the publishing industry. He outlaid just under A$8,000 for the services of a professional editor and a print run of 300 copies. Almost two years after publication, Angel of Aleppo had shifted about 250 copies.
For the second print run Cocks decided to seek the advice of an established self-publishing company in Adelaide. He invested $4,670 in a new cover design, a new font and a print run of 100 copies.
Cocks, impressed by the improvements, celebrated by sprucing up his Facebook page publicising the book.
Then everything changed.
Almost overnight he was feted by a flood of book market specialists. They all seemed to “get him”, offering encouraging praise like “a work of care and vision” and “an important statement about the Armenian genocide”. The hardest part, it seemed to Cocks, was deciding which specialist to choose.
He went with a person purporting to be “Mary Brown” who told him that Angel of Aleppo added enormous “historical and emotional weight” to the story of the genocide. He agreed to pay Brown $478.65 for a book trailer and some commissioned reviews, which she promised would assist in the distribution to her “wide network” of book clubs across the US, the UK and Australia.
When a PayPal receipt arrived, Cocks learned that he had paid the $478.65 to someone called Dayo Oguntuase. The quality of the AI-produced book trailer was so poor it proved unusable. He found no evidence of any book club picking up his novel.
Thirty glowing five-star reviews appeared on Goodreads, all written by people who had joined the site on the same day. The reviews shared a “curious rhythm”, Cocks recalls, and offered similar praise – “heartbreaking story, compelling characters, that sort of thing”.
Cocks contacted Goodreads, which deleted all the reviews. When Cocks demanded a refund, “Mary Brown” stopped responding.
Next came a person who went by the name of “Charlotte Hawthorne”. “Not just a novel … it’s a gut-punch of history, courage, and humanity rolled into one,” she wrote.
Hawthorne claimed to be a freelancer working for the global digital marketplace Upwork. She had access to “a private community of more than 2,000 active readers and reviewers … people who actually read the book before they review it”.
Her email asked for a “clean pdf” of the book (easier for AI to scrape in its entirety). She also recommended that he “tip” a cohort of reviewers.
Cocks paid Hawthorne US$1,500 for 50 reviews on 29 August. Six days later he received an email with a full refund from the company she claimed to represent.
“Unfortunately we had to block the freelancer you were working with, Olatunji Moses Mark, from Upwork due to Terms of Service violations,” the email said.
When the Guardian sought clarification from Upwork, its head of communications, Elizabeth Hutchinson, said she could not share further specifics due to “customer privacy”. “Upwork requires users to be legitimate individuals who represent themselves accurately,” she added.
Cocks was prepared to put the entire mess down to a novice’s bad luck. Then he was contacted by a major UK-based company specialising in academic publications, Express Publishing.
Except it wasn’t. It was a California-based outfit called Express Book Publishers. Believing he was signing a contract with a prestigious publisher and lured by false promises of prominent placement in the US bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, Cocks paid US$6,700.
“I wanted this book to go viral … I was targeting 100,000 copies,” he says.
Liaising with marketers using the names “Sebastian Brown” and “Martin Garratt”, there was an initial US$1,200 payment, followed by a request for an $8,000 printing fee, which Cocks negotiated down to $5,500 in exchange for an order of 1,000 copies, which he was told Barnes & Noble required if he wanted the book to be prominently displayed on its website.
The book did not sell. When Cocks started asking questions, ”Brown” and “Garratt” stalled. Then, on 23 October, Cocks received an email from Express Book Publishers saying a royalty cheque was on the way. He just needed to pay $4,000 for a “US author’s license”.
Cocks’ Google search revealed that no such licence exists. It’s a common ploy used by scammers to siphon off thousands more from victims not familiar with the US publishing landscape.
He also messaged Barnes & Noble about the upfront printing costs and received the following reply:
Barnes & Noble and its affiliates … will never request money in return for in-store, publication, or distribution services. These contracts are a scam designed to get payments from authors, in exchange for in-store placement of their title(s). This offer is not legitimate.
Cocks realised he’d been had. For the third time.
‘You magnificent fiend …’
Even major players in the publishing industry are being targeted, with fraudsters impersonating staff, literary agents and service providers associated with large publishing houses.
Penguin Random House has issued a warning identifying more than 60 known sites impersonating it, many using variants of its logo and more than a dozen using “penguin” in their website names.
It stressed that Penguin Random House “would never seek a fee from an author or require outside services to consider a manuscript”.
Amazon has also issued a warning, saying its Kindle Direct Publishing platform is a free self-publishing service that does not offer fee-based services such as editing, formatting or marketing. If a company claiming affiliation with KDP asks for money, Amazon says, it is a scam. It is suing individuals and corporations that falsely claim affiliation with Amazon’s publishing services.
About the same time Cocks was being wooed by“Charlotte Hawthorne”, “Melissa W Speier” was making overtures to the US science fiction writer Jason Sanford.
“Jason, you magnificent fiend of speculative fiction, We Who Hunt Alexanders isn’t just a story, it’s a moral workout for the soul,” she enthused. But Sanford had read an investigative piece on Writer Beware about the rise in publishing scams and recognised AI slop instantly.
In a Substack post, he described tracing the fictitious persona back to an X account called @mosesmark08 and a Moses Mark website created by Vzy, an AI-assisted web builder. When it was time to make his first payment, the banking details weren’t for an account under Speier’s name. They were for Olatunji Moses Mark.
“As a science fiction author, I’ve always loved hearing from fans of my fiction,” he tells the Guardian. “But now when someone emails saying they loved one of my stories, my first thought is that this is yet another scammer setting me up for the kill.”
To author and Guardian contributor Walter Marsh, the irony of being inundated by scammers since the publication of his second book, The Butterfly Thief, is not lost. It is a work of nonfiction about fraud. His 2023 book Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire, has also attracted renewed and unwanted attention, flooding his inbox with gushing pitches.
It started with “Lisa”, the “Organiser of The 1000 Books Book Club”, who used a Guardian logo to lend legitimacy to her missive. Over the next two weeks, the pitches poured in from “Olivia” representing “a private community of over 4,200 passionate readers”, “Amelia”, with access to “a global audience passionate about … the fusion of investigative journalism and storytelling”, and a “Nykkyb” “with 4,600+ devoted readers”. And dozens more.
“Authors write to be read but for most the path to publication is paved with rejection,” Marsh says. “These schemes exploit that, preying on aspiring authors’ emotional investment in their work and the very human desire to share stories.
“It’s bitterly ironic that these language models – trained on the written work of real people and often taken without permission and authorisation – are now enabling authors and creators to be exploited all over again.”
The enablers
These schemes could not operate at the scale they do without tech platforms, search engines and social media sites tolerating or even enabling them, according to victims and advocates.
The US-based writer James Walsh, who has lost thousands to marketing schemes, says that under Meta’s business model Facebook and predatory publishers “happily feed off one another with impunity”.
A Reuters investigation found in November that Meta was expecting to earn as much as 10% of its annual revenue – a figure potentially equating to US$16bn – from advertising tied to scams, banned goods and other illicit schemes.
Critics argue that Meta’s approach is structured to benefit from this revenue stream rather than eliminate it by requiring a “95% certainty” of fraud before banning an advertiser. If a scammer falls just short of that mark, ads aren’t removed; instead Meta applies a “penalty bid”, charging the advertiser a higher rate.
The Reuters exposé, alongside lobbying by Walsh and others, has produced results. On 4 February a bipartisan bill was introduced to the US Senate that, if passed, will require social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to combat fraudulent advertising or face legal action by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general.
A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, has called critics’ claims “exaggerated and wrong” and says his company will “aggressively fight fraud and scams”, citing a 58% reduction in user reports of scams over 18 months.
Jon’s footnote
For now, Jon Cocks remains tethered to his tormentors.
The phantom marketers “Sebastian Brown” and “Martin Garratt” still hover in the shadows, resurfacing to pester him for more money. During one of his final interviews with the Guardian, a call from “Martin” flashes across his mobile screen.
On Christmas Day “Martin” sent a forged Barnes & Noble royalty dispatch notice: Cocks had sold 258 copies of Angel of Aleppo, it said, and $4,399 could be all his – if only he would complete a form providing his paid-up $4,000 “author’s license” number. Failure to do so would result in his royalties going to charity.
As Cocks opens his email account each morning, it’s like opening a digital clown car. Pitches keep spilling out.
A “book placement specialist” named “Micheal Rollins” has offered him a virtual multi-book club event, newsletter promotions to thousands of readers, an upgraded Kindle thumbnail, a full-scale social media campaign, a podcast pitch and a custom promotional video.
Unfortunately “Micheal” forgot to delete an internal instruction from the pasted email message:
Here’s a professional, warm, and convincing response you can send to Jon. I’ve incorporated all your points, addressed his questions carefully, and made it sound human, credible, and reassuring.
While Cocks wants regulators to act, he appears resigned to the fact that, in the brave new world of artificial intelligence, the internet is beyond regulation. Still, he is collecting evidence against the AI-fuelled scams.
“I’m resolute in my own head,” he says. “I haven’t given up, I’m not going away. Those bastards are going to be just a footnote in history.”
