The novelist Joe Dunthorne wrote a piece for The Guardian on November 1 about his fan mail. Readers from Barcelona, Chicago and Warsaw write him long, warm, well-informed letters almost every day.
Every one of them is fake.
He got one from Ottessa Moshfegh, the Booker-shortlisted novelist. It talked shop about her novel in progress and then steered him toward her Amazon page. Other writers have had letters from a fake Donna Tartt and a fake Sally Rooney.
Then he did what plenty of us have fantasized about. When the “founder of the Berlin Book Club” offered to find him readers for a fee, he played along and insisted on paying in cash, by mail. After a couple of days of haggling she gave him a street address.
It was in the Philippines, on a rural road with a junk shop, a church and a large building behind high white walls.
That building is the part of the story I want authors to understand. The letter in your inbox is a costume.
Somebody wrote the script and somebody built the set. The person reading the lines is often there against their will.
Who writes the fake fan mail authors get?
A lot of it comes from industrial scam operations in Southeast Asia, run mostly by organized crime groups and staffed by people who were tricked or trafficked into the work. They answer a job ad for customer service or data entry, arrive in another country, lose their passports and spend their days running cons from a desk. Some are beaten or sold to another compound when they miss their numbers. Others were scammers by choice. From your inbox, you can’t tell which.
The scale is hard to take in.
In August 2023 the United Nations human rights office estimated that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and around 100,000 in Cambodia could be held in situations where they’re forced to carry out online scams. The Philippines, Laos and Thailand have their own compounds.
The one Dunthorne mentions in Bamban, north of Manila, was raided in 2024 after a worker escaped. Police rescued more than 700 people.
Alice Guo, the town’s mayor, was sentenced to life in prison for human trafficking in November 2025.
So when a “reader” named Bella or Thalina tells you your novel changed her life, the honest picture is a cubicle, a quota and a supervisor walking the rows.
The stage set behind the scam
A fan letter to an author is one more set on the same lot, cheaper to build than a fake police station.
I’m using the theater comparison on purpose, because some of these places are built like studios.
In December, during border clashes, Thai troops took over a scam compound in O’Smach, Cambodia. When reporters toured it this year, the AP found mock police stations and law enforcement uniforms from seven countries, including China, Australia, India and Brazil, and a replica of a Vietnamese bank branch. Workers filmed video calls on those sets, posing as police or bank officers to frighten victims into paying. Face-swapping apps let them wear whatever face the con needs.
The biggest money is in what the trade calls pig butchering: a long romance or friendship that ends with the victim pouring savings into a fake crypto investment. Victims have lost retirement savings and homes. The scripts run for months, and Dunthorne quotes a former compound manager telling the BBC the work was all about exploiting emotion and creating a dream.
A fan letter to an author is one more set on the same lot, cheaper to build than a fake police station. The dream it sells is the one every writer has, that a stranger read your book and loved it.
Why does AI make author scam emails so convincing?
Because the AI writing them has read our books.
The large language models were trained on enormous libraries, and a lot of that was copyrighted fiction and nonfiction taken without asking. Anthropic agreed in 2025 to pay $1.5 billion to settle the authors’ class action over the books used to train Claude. In July of this year Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier and the novelist Scott Turow sued Google over the books used to build Gemini.
One of Dunthorne’s writer friends summed up the result better than I can: you know the letters are fake because they’ve read all your books.
The flattery tells you nothing anymore. The request for money tells you everything. – Richard LoweShare on X
A year ago the easy tell was that the praise never went past your Amazon description. I wrote that up in my guide to spotting author scam emails, and it still catches the lazy ones. For a well-known author it fails, because the model can name your characters, quote your themes and talk about your second book as if it had a favorite chapter. A smaller author may still get the blurb treatment, but the gap is closing.
So what still works? Look at the end of the letter. Somewhere in the second or third message there’s a fee, a payment app, a “friend” with a service, or a link to sign in. Real readers buy your book.
They don’t invoice you for the privilege of reading it.
| The letter says | What is behind it |
|---|---|
| Detailed praise for your book | An AI model that was trained on books, possibly yours |
| A city-wide book club or reading community | A name made up for this script, with no members to check |
| A note from a famous author | A borrowed name that checks out on Google |
| A small fee to cover costs | The whole point of the conversation |
| CashApp, wire transfer or crypto | Payment you can’t dispute or pull back |
What the ones in my inbox look like
With as many books as I have in print, I get several of these a day. They ask nothing at first. They’re excited about my book, they run a reading group or a review service or a promotion network, and would I like to hear more?
I answered one, once, just to see where it led. The reply came back fast with a $500 package. I deleted it and blocked the address.
My mail now runs through a shell script that drops around a thousand known senders before I ever see them, and most of what still gets through is some version of the same con.
I spent thirty-three years in IT, and the lesson that carries over is simple. Ignore the signature line and look at what the message wants you to do. The board seat scam and the old friend who suddenly needed money are the same play in different costumes: warm opening, flattering premise, money at the end. Once you’ve seen the shape of it a few times, the costume stops mattering and you see the play.
Should an author play along with a book club scam email?
Dunthorne wanted to unmask the villain, and I get the temptation. He did one useful thing with it: he handed the address to the Philippines’ cybercrime agency.
For most of us, playing along does more harm than good. A reply proves your address is live and read by a person. Your name then goes onto lists that are traded and sold.
You’ll get more of these, not fewer.
There’s also the person on the other end. You aren’t trolling a mastermind. The odds are good that you’re wasting the afternoon of somebody who’ll be punished for missing a quota.
The people who profit never type a word.
So report it. In the United States that’s ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and the FBI takes internet fraud reports at IC3.gov. Writer Beware tracks the schemes aimed at writers and posts warnings when new ones appear. Mark the message as phishing in your mail program so the filter learns, then delete it. A decent spam gateway will stop most of the rest before you ever have to look at it.
My take
Treat every fan letter that ends in a fee as a scam, however well it knows your book. AI can fake the reading now, but it can’t fake the reason it wrote to you. Don’t reply, even to have fun with them, because the reply only puts you on a better list. Report it, block it and get back to writing. A real reader shows up with a review, not an invoice.
Take the costume off before you answer
The next time a stranger writes to say your book moved them, read past the praise to the request. If there’s no request, enjoy it.
If there’s a fee, a payment app or a sign-in link, you know what you’re looking at.
My publishing and marketing hub collects what I’ve written about getting books in front of real readers, and the cybersecurity hub covers the security side. If you’d like publishing help from a person whose name and books are public, my self-published author services list my name and my books right on the page.
The letter will keep getting better. The writing will improve and the details will get sharper, and some day it may arrive on video with a famous face. Behind it there’s still a building with high white walls, a room full of borrowed costumes, and someone reading a script they didn’t choose.
Don’t send them your money.
My guide for the people at home who get these messages too. It starts with who is trying to harm your family and how they get in, then walks through locking down each device.
