Scams!

It sometimes feels like the social media world is a shark pool. A while ago I joined Bluesky – a nice, welcoming, we’re-all-friends-here-not-like-in-the-other-place social media platform. I followed some bookish people, most of them genuine and lovely. But then I had a DM.

“Hi there! I see you are a fellow writer. What genre do you operate in?”

This person’s profile showed that she was a published author of detective fiction. I googled her, and she was a real writer, so I responded, and fell into a short conversation about writing fiction and the challenges of promoting it.

Then she told me about the wonderful book marketer who did all her promotion for her. She said she had thousands of followers, book sales and reviews, thanks to this amazing marketer.

“I can see she’s on here at the moment,” she added. “Shall I introduce you?”

“Ok,” I said. And a DM from the book marketer appeared at once.

Now I know that there are many, many dodgy people out there claiming to be book marketers, or agents, or publishers, who will just take your money and run, but I was thinking that this person had been recommended by a real author, so I responded to the DM and asked her what she offered. She had a nice friendly profile page with a nice friendly name and a nice friendly picture.

She offered to plan for me a marketing strategy, promote my books far and wide, and even run all my social media for me – for a substantial fee, of course.

When I googled her name, though, I couldn’t find any trace of her. Big red flag. I asked if her if she had a website. No. Hmm.

Then the penny dropped.

If she was offering to run my social media, then perhaps she was running the social media of the author who had contacted me… had I been talking to the book marketer all along?

I backed off.

It gets worse.

A few days later, I noticed that the author’s account had been deleted. Strange. Then a few weeks later, I noticed that the author had a new account.

Now that I’m older and wiser by several weeks, I realise that the whole thing was a scam. The author’s account had very few original posts, and when I dug deeper I began to suspect that the name and photo of this author – a woman in her eighties – was being used to create fake social media accounts to lure other writers.

Since then I’ve been followed by other accounts claiming to belong to famous authors, and I’ve wised up to how much falsity is out there. Fake accounts have few original posts, if any, and instead create the illusion of activity with a burst of re-posts, usually all on the same day. Of course, as well as the fake writers there are all the half-naked ladies and muscular men luring us into expensive romance, but they’re easy to spot from their profiles: 20 followers, 488 following, 0 posts, army patriot/Christian/medical doctor/father “loves life and honesty”, with a stolen photo of a man in uniform.

It’s a shark pool out there!