Authors Face AI-Written Fake Fan Mail – One Writer Traced a Scammer to the Philippines

Writers around the world are receiving fake emails in which supposedly passionate readers praise their books and offer to promote them at book clubs, provided the author transfers a few hundred dollars to cover costs. The author of a first-person piece in The Guardian's culture section, whose name does not appear in the source text, describes the experience. Thanks to generative artificial intelligence (AI), such messages have become personalised enough that they often slip past spam filters and reach inboxes.

AI that has read the books

The author notes that the AI tools helping to write these scams really have "read" writers' work. Last year Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn in compensation to thousands of authors whose work was used to train its AI model, Claude. In July, a group of publishers sued Google over the training of its model, Gemini. Some writers have also received fake letters signed with the names of well-known authors, including Ottessa Moshfegh, Donna Tartt and Sally Rooney.

An attempt to unmask the scammer

After an email arrived from the supposed founder of the Berlin Book Club, the author decided to play along. She claimed she could only pay in cash, and after two days of correspondence was given a postal address in the Philippines. On Google Maps it turned out to be a rural road with palm trees and a large building behind high walls. She sent no money but passed the details to the Philippine cybercrime agency.

The scam compounds

The Philippines, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia are the countries most affected by organised-crime-run "scam farms". Last year authorities in Bamban, north of Manila, freed nearly 700 people who had been forced to work as scammers. The compounds across south-east Asia are a multi-billion-dollar industry run largely by Chinese crime syndicates. The Bamban complex, it emerged, was run by the local mayor, Alice Guo. Winston Casio, spokesman for the Philippine presidential anti-organised-crime commission, said the criminals have the financial capability to corrupt just about anybody in public office.