Can you catch the trick in the above letter? I was staring and staring and couldn’t figure out the scam. Yes, I get it that “Mushens and Churchill” is a fake literary agency (according to this post from Victoria Strauss, which is where I found this story, this particular scammer is taking the name of the legitimate literary agent Juliet Mushens, which is a really horrible thing to do), and they’re preying on the hopes of authors. I get that “we cannot promise the moon and the stars” is classic soft-sell. What I couldn’t figure out is what’s the motivation for the scammer. They get someone to send them their unpublished manuscript? Later they ask for money to publish the book? But that doesn’t make sense—the author is already self-publishing. (And, yes, there’s no shame in paying money to publish your own work—do you think this blog hosting comes for free?)
Strauss explains how the scam works:
Although I haven’t yet heard from anyone who has actually signed up with MCLit, and therefore don’t know what they’re charging, the fifth paragraph of the solicitation above gives away what they’re selling: an “International Literary Registration Seal and Bookstore Access Code”. Both of these are completely bogus items that scammers have invented to enable them to drain writers’ bank accounts.
Ha! I didn’t catch that at all.
Here’s another:
Strauss spells it out for us:
Story Arc Literary Groups employs an approach common to many fake literary agency scams: promising to work on commission only, with no other fees due (note especially paragraph 5, which helpfully explains that “a reputable literary agent should not charge upfront fees”). The aim of such solicitations, however, is always money, and writers who sign up with Story Arc soon discover this. In order for Story Arc to successfully pitch a book to traditional publishers, authors are told they must first “re-license” their book (a requirement that, as I’ve explained in another blog post, is completely fictional). As is typical for this type of scam, they’re referred to a “trusted” company to perform the service–in this case, an outfit called CreativeIP. The price tag: $5,000.
Ouch!
Here’s another:
Typical of fake literary agency scams, Zenith Literary is an aggressive solicitor. One writer who responded to this solicitation was told that in order to snag a traditional publisher’s interest, they needed to gather various “action items”, including “ten editorial reviews and endorsements” (hint: reviews and endorsements are nice, but they are absolutely not required by traditional publishers). To obtain these, the writer was referred to Verse Bound Solutions, a company with no apparent existence beyond a Wyoming business registration but active enough to phone the author and offer them ten book reviews for $3,000.
And another:
The author who was targeted with [a solicitation from “ImplicitPress Literary Agency”] was asked to supply a variety of necessary “documents”; note #5, which is what this scam is hoping to sell (no publisher requires or cares about a book trailer):
If you’re itching for more such stories, just go here:
What a world we live in.
P.S. In case you’re wondering about the title of this post, see here for the relevant background.
It’s a good post, but burying the wolfram connection to a P.s. at the end (I read post twice searching for the connection) and then still not delivering, but linking to a long, old post (at which point, I gave up with the treasure search) felt a little click baitish. I mean the title of the post drives views…and you definitely play coy afterwards.
Again, I like the overall post. But the title? No. Even enough to slightly turn me off the post itself.
Anon:
Hey, you should take it up with Marty McKee. The Wolfram connection is his fault!
Maybe I’m too harsh or imprecise in calling poor McKee a clickbaiter. He was a little too cute with the teased meta-post title.
I’ll take it up with him, next time we’re drinking together. ;)
What I find most appalling about this kind of scam is the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top: It is usually the poor people who are the victims, and the scammers make a pretty penny out of it (otherwise they would not do it). I have also heard in the news of scams where the scammers were slaves, which is a whole new level of pitch-black evil. I am reminded of a statement made by a financial fraud investigator in a documentary about Madoff. He said: ‘In blue-collar crime, the investigation starts when a body is found. In white-collar crime, the bodies start dropping after the investigation breaks.’
P.S. I could have sworn from the name of the website that ‘m c l i t .org’ was a porn site, not a fraudulent literary agent.
About 10 years ago at defcon there was talk by a spammer. He said the main target was actually not the “spamees”, but the new/younger generation of potential spammers who don’t know any better.
The product was actually the database of emails/etc along with the spamming software and content. Ie, the spam itself is more a kind of advertising for the spamming infrastructure you want to sell.
“It is usually the poor people who are the victims….”
Is it? Poor people write a lot of books? They have a lot of money to take?
My bet is that is that the more likely victim group is middle class or higher elderly people who have resources and are vulnerable due to loneliness and the effects of advancing age on their judgement. I can’t recall where but I saw a story recently about an elderly man who had been fairly successful but lost his live savings to a person posing as a potential partner. He willingly transfered it to an account that person had set up, then never heard from the person again.
I could see the literary scam working nicely on older middle- to upper-middle-class retired people. They have money, ample time to write, a desire to be heard, and often impaired judgement.
I’m a big fan of Nigerian princes (LOL). It does not surprise me at all that new scams appear all the time. Whether or not the great Barnum said it, “there’s a sucker born every minute” is a constant as well as a reminder that we all need to be vigilant. Too many stories about people who have lost large sums of money which is both sad and a warning. I know of one who fell for the scam involving fake FBI agents and moved almost all of her retirement money into an account that was quickly looted. the worst part of it is they are responsible for paying income tax on the withdrawals.
My problem with the Nigerian prince email is like the boy who cried wolf. When you finally get a real one, how you gonna know?
Stochasticartoonist:
My best guess of the number of real Nigerian princes who will send you money is zero, so no worries on this one.
More generally, regarding amazing investment opportunities, you can just think that if you don’t hop on that train, someone else will, and the resulting riches will make that other person very happy. So it’s a win all around.
> And, yes, there’s no shame in paying money to publish your own work—do you think this blog hosting comes for free
I think you’re right here. Some top journals (Nature, Science) etc charge APCs. And really their business model isn’t much different from that of predatory publishers (although they are selling chance to publish in prestigious journal and not just any journal, and to maintain that prestige they are selective). So the problem isn’t paying to publish, it’s paying to publish somewhere with no prestige that isn’t selective.