AI Is Writing the Publishing Scam Emails That Authors Have Always Dreamed Of Receiving
Criminals are using AI tools to generate convincing, personalised pitch emails that mimic famous editors and publishers. First-time authors are losing tens of thousands of dollars.
Key points
- An Australian publishing scam operation based in the Philippines defrauded nearly 800 writers of more than $48 million over six years, according to the US government.
- Australian novelist Mary Colussi received a fake email impersonating Granta publishing head Bella Lacey within two weeks of her debut novel going on sale in June 2025.
- The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) says some writers now receive multiple scam emails per day.
- US fraud researcher Victoria Strauss traces the current wave of AI-driven publishing scams primarily to Nigeria.
- Scammers lead with flattery and only raise fees once they have built a relationship with the author.
Two weeks after her debut novel Touch Grass came out this June, Australian writer Mary Colussi got what looked like her big break. An email arrived, apparently from Bella Lacey, the head of Granta, a respected UK literary publisher. The message gushed about her novel's "originality, intelligence, and distinctive narrative voice" and asked to discuss future projects.
Colussi almost believed it. "As a writer, you want to believe it," she told The Age.
She didn't, though. The praise tracked too closely to her book's published synopsis. One paragraph lifted a phrase from it directly. Then there was the email address: @aol.com. A check of the Granta website confirmed it: the real publisher had already posted a warning about criminals impersonating its staff.
How is AI making these scams more convincing?
AI tools can read a book's online description, reviews, and publicity copy in seconds, then generate a personalised email that sounds like a careful human reader wrote it. That is the step-change.
Before this, scam emails targeting authors were easy to spot: generic, badly written, no sense that anyone had actually read the work. The new wave is different. ASA chief executive Lucy Hayward explains it plainly: criminals can now feed an author's publicly available material into an AI tool, get a detailed summary, and build an email around it. "They're able to give the impression that they have read an author's work, which makes the email convincing," she says.
Author and ASA board member Kelly Gardiner receives these emails every day. She has noticed they share the same fingerprints: identical phrases, identical logic, identical sentence patterns. "The AI-generated copy is its own genre now," she says, "and you can spot it once you've seen a few."
Oddly, most of Gardiner's scam emails reference books she published years ago, not recent titles. Her theory: those older books were included in pirated datasets used to train AI models.
Who is actually losing money?
Experienced authors are increasingly wise to the tricks. The real damage lands on people writing their first book: someone working on a memoir, a grandparent writing children's stories, a retiree with a life story they want to share.
Victoria Strauss, a US author who has tracked publishing fraud since 1998, describes the pattern: "I sometimes hear from the relatives of older people, often on fixed incomes, who've lost enormous amounts of money and cannot be convinced that they're being scammed because the scammers are using psychological manipulation to establish personal relationships."
The technique has a name used in fraud circles: "pig butchering", a term borrowed from romance scams that describes the process of building trust and affection before demanding payment. Most emails never mention money at first. They open with compliments and promises. Fees come later, once the author is emotionally invested.
One operation, run from the Philippines, defrauded nearly 800 writers of more than $48 million over six years before US authorities moved against it. Strauss traces the current AI-driven wave to a different source: "Everything I can collect and deduce indicates they primarily come from Nigeria. I see them as a descendant of the 'Nigerian prince' scams of old."
| Scam detail | Figure |
|---|---|
| Writers defrauded (Philippines operation) | ~800 |
| Total losses (Philippines operation) | $48 million+ |
| Years the operation ran | 6 |
| ASA scam reports: frequency | Multiple per author per day |
| Strauss AI-scam reports received | Hundreds |
What should writers (and their families) watch for?
Check the sender's email address against the publisher's official website before responding to any unsolicited praise. A genuine editor at a major publisher will not have an @aol.com, @gmail.com, or @yahoo.com address.
Search the publisher's website for scam warnings. Granta, among others, has published one. If someone praises your work in detail but every detail could have come from your back cover copy or press release, that is a red flag, not a compliment.
If fees appear at any point in a publishing discussion, stop. Legitimate publishers pay authors; they do not charge them.
Common questions
Is this only a risk for professional authors?
No. Strauss says the people currently losing money are mostly first-time or non-professional writers, precisely because they have less familiarity with how the publishing industry works and fewer people around them to sound the alarm.
Can I just ignore all unsolicited publishing emails now?
Not quite. Hayward's concern is the opposite problem: the flood of fakes is so large that some genuine opportunities are being buried and missed. Check the email address, verify independently using contact details from the publisher's own website, and never respond to fee requests.
