What to Do – and Not to Do – When a Book Scammer Approaches You

Book marketing scammers have become so annoying that many authors have decided to strike back. They often do this through scambaiting.

Scambaiting, according to Law and Technology Resources for Legal Professionals, is “the practice of engaging with online fraudsters to waste their time, disrupt their operations, and gather evidence, often for entertainment or public education.” You can find any number of bloggers and authors who post humorous stories about their interactions with scammers. They are quite satisfying stories, actually.

Still, you never should interact directly with scammers. Doing so just gets you added to more scam email lists or DMs from other handles that the scammer operates, as the scammer knows that your email address or social media profile is active. Some scammers, once they realize you’re scambaiting or you call them out, will respond with nasty, profanity-laden emails or DMs. Other scammers even will seek revenge by threatening to damage your reputation or works (usually with bad reviews) if you don’t agree to work with them; some just go straight to posting falsehoods about you.

What should you do instead? There are several steps you can take.

Block and delete
• Always mark the email as spam and a phishing attempt
• Delete the message on your social media post then block the sender
• Block phone numbers (even though it’s probably spoofed)

Report
• Report the email domain to the hosting company
• Report fake pages and accounts to the social media company
• Report spam texts and calls to your phone company

Share
• Post on all of your social media the email account and social media profile name that is sending scam messages. Use the hashtag #bookmarketingscam on the post.
• You don’t need to keep a central list of scammers. Simply getting them on X, Facebook or Instagram ensures that anyone else looking up their email or profile name in the future will quickly learn a scammer had targeted them, protecting them from being defrauded

Research the message
If you’re suspicious that the email, or DM or phone number is from a scammer, spend five minutes doing simple searches on the internet. Look up their:

Name
• If the name doesn’t show up, that’s a bad sign. Even if they’re not a scammer, they’re inexperienced.
• If the name is of a celebrity or a book character, that’s a red flag.
• If the name is on LinkedIn and they list their location as Nigeria, Pakistan or the Philippines, move on.

Email address
• If the email address shows up on an article or a social media post with the #bookmarketingscam hashtag, you’ve run into a scammer.
• If email doesn’t show up, it’s probably new, which is also a bad sign.
• Compare the email to others on the website of the company the marketer claims to work for. If the email address after the @ sign doesn’t match what others at the company use, that’s a sure sign you’re dealing with a fraudster.

Company|
• If there’s no website, that means they’re a made-up company or at best that they are so new that they have no track record.
• If there’s a website but it looks generic or created by AI, then it’s a fraud.
• If there’s a website but a warning on it that bad actors are pretending to be them, then it’s probably a scam, especially if you’ve never met anyone from the company.

You’ve been lured in
If you’ve responded to an email then realize it’s a scam, stop communicating and never:
• Give out personal information.
• Say “yes” if speaking to them. Your voice is being recorded and can be used to access your personal accounts.
• Pay with gift card or wire transfer, as you have no way to get your money back.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out my book about marketing scams aimed at writers: