Even as a new category of literary scams emerges every few days, authors have very little information about the people behind them.
In August, Danny de Hek, a New Zealand-based scam buster, forwarded me an Excel spreadsheet he received from a scammer in Karachi, Pakistan, with permission from the sender. Titled “LinkedIn Outreach 2026,” it has monthly data on targeted authors from March until August. One sheet has 403 names, each neatly labeled: New author, cookbook author, religious author, investigative author, poetry author, New York Times bestselling author and so on. Most are based in the U.S.; the rest are in Canada, Australia, or Europe.
Scam recipients often find the emails they receive haphazard and random. But the modern scam industry is a highly organized system modeled on the global corporate setup, with clearly laid-out deliverables, salaries, incentives and reporting structures.
It’s an incredibly detailed document, with columns for the name of the person who found the profile, the person who first reached out, the service the author needs (website development, illustrator, social media visibility), the department handling the author, meeting links shared with the author. In a few cases, the document also lists the outcome of the outreach.
“Paid $1200 UP FRONT.”
“Not willing to pay has been scammed before.”
“Meeting booked Wed Aug 12, 10-00 PM PKT, number confirmed, deep trust-built relationship, ready to invest, needs custom package built around limited budget and multi-project scope.”
Some of the details only make sense if you know the context. 10 p.m. PKT would mean 10 a.m. on the U.S. West Coast and 1 p.m. in the East. Danny told me that most of the people working on this scam are Pakistani, yet the names of the callers are all American-sounding — Ashley, Jocelyn, Megan — probably to fool the authors into thinking they are Americans working for U.S.-based companies and groups.
Scam recipients often find the emails they receive haphazard and random. But the modern scam industry is a highly organized system modeled on the global corporate setup, with clearly laid-out deliverables, salaries, incentives and reporting structures. Even though the schemes are mind-boggling in range, the young people joining these “companies” are given the same targets: Americans on top, followed by gullible foreigners in other Western countries. I spent several years reporting from India on its massive scam call-center network, which employs hundreds of thousands of educated young people trying to beat the dim economic prospects offered by the domestic labor market. Similar Excel spreadsheets are used to organize schemes where Indian scammers in Delhi or Kolkata impersonate Microsoft tech support, the Internal Revenue Service or even the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
De Hek, who exposes transnational scams on his blog and YouTube channel with relentless zeal, told me Pakistan’s fake companies offering literary services operate in a similar fashion to India’s scam call centers. The majority of them maintain physical offices in Karachi and Lahore and employ people aged 20 to 24. Upon joining, the young employees typically get assigned to a unit, each designed around a specific literary swindle. While entry-level employees may only be tasked with outreach, the more experienced ones are entrusted with building long-term relationships aimed at selling multiple “packages” to clients over months and sometimes years.
The most profitable service targets authors lurking outside the notoriously gatekept realm of traditional publishing. Rather than through a cold call or email, the scammers lure them through websites offering self-publishing or vanity publishing.
By this time, she had been talking to him over Zoom and email for more than a year and paid his company around $100,000 for different author services, from editing and cover design to coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Scam companies in Pakistan trap writers by impersonating known publishing houses and paying thousands of dollars to influence search results on Google. As a result, someone with a finished manuscript who searches online may find sites such as penguinwriters.com or amazonglobalpublishers.com before any legitimate self-publishing platform. Unlike traditional publishing websites, these feature open calls for new writers. WritersWeekly.com estimates there are at least 3,000 such sites. The biggest tell: A chat box pops up in the bottom right of all fake publishing websites as soon as the page opens, followed by a message from someone with an American-sounding name (like Mark Anderson or Jessica Parker), and a white person’s face: “How can I help you today?” “Talk to a live agent, not a bot!” claims a ticker. And that much is absolutely true: The person messaging you is a scammer whose shift is dictated by the waking hours in your time zone.
None of the five major trade publisher has sued alleged impersonators. The only recorded instance involves Amazon, which took nearly 20 individuals and associated companies to court in California for falsely claiming affiliation with Amazon Publishing and Kindle Direct Publishing to deceive authors. Amazon won $36.4 million in February 2025.
M. L. Stark, a Danish self-published author of several psychological thrillers, is one of the rare victims who has met — and confronted — her scammer in person. Last year, she flew to Thailand to meet with Ethan Williams, a man she believed had become her longtime editor at a L.A.-based self-publishing house affiliated with Amazon — and a close friend. By this time, she had been talking to him over Zoom and email for more than a year and paid his company around $100,000 for different author services, from editing and cover design to coverage in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
While most of the services she paid for never materialized, the company did follow through on some. They signed her up on IngramSpark, a self-publishing platform, which enabled her to release two books, and Amazon, which made the books available on the platform. Most notably, in 2024, one of her titles was displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square.
“I had paid $10,000 for that,” she told me. Only later, she told me, did she come to see these deliveries as strategic concessions, held back for moments when a long-term client reached the end of her tether. “Each time, it happened when I told them, after months of them stalling, that I wanted my money back.”
The scammers’ last pitch was a Netflix adaptation that they claimed the filmmakers wanted to shoot in Thailand, an important setting in her upcoming book, a thriller based on her own life. Stark and Williams were meeting in Thailand to scout locations.
He had told her he was a British citizen, half English and half Arab; as a light-skinned Pakistani, his story was plausible. “He is an artist, he knew how to play the role,” she said. Still, she asked him to show an ID. He produced one that looked clearly faked. “I demanded he show me his passport,” she said. That exposed his real name and citizenship. He came clean. “He said, ‘yeah, this has been a scam from the beginning. Even Peter is using a fake name; even Ronald is using a fake name. Everybody in the company that you have talked to is a scammer. It’s a huge scam operation, and we are not based in Los Angeles. We are based in Karachi.’” She is still processing her shock.
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I clicked on a random website from a list of known scam sites; it happened to be impersonating Red Rock, a real literary agency based in London whose authors have been published by major publishers like Hurst, which published my first book in the U.K. Bold promises greeted me on the home page.
“Get Seen On Times Square”
“Bring Your Book & Brand on Broadway”
“Join our authors making their mark in Manhattan”
A chat window opened, and someone with the username “Rae Donnaelly” asked how she could help. I told her I had an idea for a book. She asked for my contact, then called me on WhatsApp from a U.S. number. She spoke like a South Asian imitating an American accent, something I could easily recognize because I’m South Asian myself, and we’ve all tried it at one point or another.
I told her the truth: I was writing an article about author-baiting scams, and I was hoping she could tell me about her experience working for a fake publishing house.
She told me she wasn’t “authorized” to talk about the company she works for, and she refused to tell me her real name. But she had no qualms spilling the beans on her ex-employer.
Rae has a law degree but found it difficult to find a job in law after university. Her first job after graduating was at a fake publishing company in Karachi. “I started working for a company which was a scam — a guaranteed scam — and I didn’t know it when I started off with them. I was an intern trying to learn how the system really works; what the pros and cons are.”
It took Rae only a few days to figure out the company’s business model: proxy sales. They would tell the author they would get them a guaranteed sale order for 1,000 copies, or something like that, making “fake commitments.” The scam rarely stopped there. After a client signed up for developmental editing, they would be offered a discount on book-cover design, and once they paid for that, the scammer would dangle social media management. “It could start off from as little as $400-$500, and it could go up to the skies, like $10,000, $15,000.”
According to Talal Choudhary, a Karachi-based tech journalist, there are some 1,000 Pakistani companies running scam sites. “One company runs as many as 25 websites. I personally know a company that had about 200 employees, just offering services to writers.”
As with all scams, those executing the con learned how easily people can be manipulated if you know what they desired. “You could see how the human brain works. It’s actually scary when you think about it,” Rae admitted.
She believes Americans make easy scam targets. “People in the U.S. are very nice, they’re very good-hearted people. They trust you. Whatever you’re saying, they trust you. That’s the problem.”
At times, the clients only noticed they had been scammed after they had paid all the way up to a Times Square display and Broadway adaptation. “When the authors did not see results, they would either reverse the charge on their card or accuse us of being scamsters,” Rae recalled.
According to Talal Choudhary, a Karachi-based tech journalist, there are some 1,000 Pakistani companies running scam sites. “One company runs as many as 25 websites. I personally know a company that had about 200 employees, just offering services to writers.” These companies are “very, very profitable,” he said. “From one client, you can make $60,000.”
In Pakistan, Choudhary told me, the workforce of the author-baiting scams is largely made up of high-school and university graduates. They earn an average salary of around 50,000 Pakistani rupees ($180) a month. For high performers, there is commission. For every sale worth $1,000, they might get a 10 to 20 percent commission, he said, upselling until the author backs out.
According to Rae, any guilt the scammers felt was canceled out by the increasingly skewed conversion rate between the American dollar and Pakistani rupee. “Generally, the mentality was: When you’re making income in dollars, you have a stable life, you have sustainability. So that’s what they did. They just ripped people off.”
I have heard multiple versions of this statement since I first reported on the rise of organized transnational fraud. Earlier this year, Hoy received a message on Facebook from a Nigerian man who offered to market her latest novel. Convinced he was part of the suspected author-scam network, she made him an offer of her own: Write an article for Writersweekly.com about how the company he worked for scams Americans while being based overseas.
But he wrote it using AI, which is against the site’s submission rules. He also ignored the brief. Instead, he chose to highlight, as Hoy recalls, “how it’s so hard for people in Africa and therefore it’s okay to scam Americans because all of us are rich over here.”
Salil Mahmood, who asked that I change his name, is another self-described ex-scammer from Karachi. He reached out to me after hearing from Danny de Hek about the article I was writing. Compared to some of the more outrageous deals his seniors offered their clients, his job, as an entry-level recruit, was low-key. He cold-emailed published authors with a proposal to create their official pages on Wikipedia and have those approved. However, many of the pages he created — largely based on information provided by the authors — failed verification because the citations he supplied were fabricated. “The pages would remain active for a while and then disappear.” The authors never got their money back.
While he only worked there for a few months, he said the setup was highly aspirational for those who wanted to make serious money. “The bosses would show us pictures of their lifestyles: mansions, fast cars, parties and lots of alcohol. If you met your targets, they would have a rented car drive you around.” But in keeping with the nature of such enterprises, failure was not an option. “If an employee did not meet the target, they and their families were threatened with violence,” he said.
Rae left the company she had been working for following a disagreement with her manager less than a year into the job. But rather than go back on the job market, she and a few friends started a new company that, as she described, provides American authors with tailored services.
She insisted her company did not defraud its clients. I could have asked her why, if it was a genuine publishing house in Pakistan, it gave clients the impression that it was based in the U.S.; why the website featured books they had not published; or why the individuals who popped up in the chat boxes used fake, American-sounding names, including her. But I left it at that. I could sense she wanted me to believe she had nothing to do with the scammers. She even pointed out that her religion does not allow her to earn money from fraud.
“You can look out for us at the next Frankfurt Book Fair,” she said. I told her I would.
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I still get emails from Timothy Firth — the impersonator — reminding me to send my voluntary contribution in gratitude for the book-club discussion.
The person writing to me as Timothy probably knows it is not coming. I have a feeling the scammers know I am onto them because of how the meeting ended. After running through all the questions they had prepared, the moderator asked if I had any final comments.
I asked if any of them had thoughts to share about the last chapter in my book. Reported from fake call centers in Delhi, it is the story of ambitious young people being drawn into an underworld of scams and fraud.
Nobody spoke for a while. Then I saw Timothy unmute herself.
“It is happening all over the world,” she said, “including in Africa.”
That’s all she had to say.
✺ Published in The Dial
