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 praised 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 quoted 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 ingest an author's publicly available material in seconds and produce 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, with no sense that anyone had read the work. The new wave is different. ASA chief executive Lucy Hayward puts it plainly: criminals can feed an author's public material into an AI tool, get a detailed summary, and build a pitch around it. "They're able to give the impression that they have read an author's work, which makes the email convincing," she told The Age.
Author and ASA board member Kelly Gardiner receives these emails every day. She's 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. Her theory: those older titles were swept into 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 first-time writers: someone working on a memoir, a grandparent writing children's stories, a retiree with a life story they want to share.
Victoria Strauss has tracked publishing fraud since 1998 via the website Writer Beware. She 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 is called "pig butchering," a term borrowed from romance scams that describes building trust before demanding payment. We reported in July on federal charges against two New Yorkers accused of laundering $43 million from pig-butchering investment scams, a reminder that the underlying playbook travels well across fraud categories. Most publishing scam emails never mention money at first. They open with compliments and promises. Fees come later, once the author is emotionally committed.
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 won't have an @aol.com or @gmail.com address.
Search the publisher's website for scam warnings. Granta, among others, has published one. Detailed praise that could have been assembled from your back cover copy is a red flag, not a compliment. Fee requests at any point in a publishing discussion are a full stop: legitimate publishers pay authors.
Hayward's deeper concern is the opposite problem: the volume of fakes is so large that genuine opportunities get buried. Check every address. Verify independently using contact details from the publisher's own site.
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 publishing works and fewer people around them to sound the alarm.
Should you just ignore all unsolicited publishing emails now?
Not quite. The flood of fakes is real, but so are legitimate cold approaches, particularly from smaller book clubs and podcasters who won't always have professional email addresses. Check the address, verify through the publisher's own website, and never respond to fee requests.
