1 PERSON PRETENDING TO BE 4 PEOPLE: How Multi-Tiered Publishing Scams Work

EDITOR’S NOTE: During my followup conversation with Bill, he shared that he lost $1,720.00. He also shared that the scammers were using Gmail and another free email service, not email addresses associated with the real companies’ domain names.

Q –

Angela,

On April 16th, I received an email from someone I believed to be Rosa Schierenberg, an Editorial Director at Viking Fiction, Penguin UK. I looked her up online, and everything appeared to be legitimate. I responded, and she was in fact interested in my novel, but Viking Books does not deal directly with authors, and I’d need an Agent to proceed. I asked her if she could recommend one, and she recommended Michelle Richter at Fuse Literary.

I found Michelle Richter at Fuse Literary online, and again, she appeared to be legitimate. I contacted her using the email Rosa Schierenberg provided. Michelle Richter seemed very interested in my novel as well. She asked to see my query letter. I sent it, and she said it was not up to industry standards. She recommended George Godwin, a Query Letter Specialist. I couldn’t find him online but assumed he was simply an independent contractor. I contacted him with the information Michelle provided and hired him to do the work.

Michelle was happy with the result. The query letter was actually a webpage. George suggested that my website be updated as well, so it too would be more professional and offered to do that job as well. Since Michelle had worked with him before, and she was a successful literary agent, I agreed.

At this point, Michelle was busy editing my manuscript and George was working on the website. Michelle suggested I hire a Manuscript Designer to go through the whole manuscript and clean up any formatting errors. She referred me to a designer, and he quoted three packages. I contacted my long-time editor as well as the interior designer who had designed all three of my books, and neither of them had ever heard of a manuscript designer. That was a red flag, and I explained to the Designer and Michelle that I couldn’t spend any more money than I already had.

I was notified the website was “complete” and took a look. It wasn’t different, but he did show me a report of how much better it was statistically, a screenshot of a report. My first thought was that the work he had done was to improve all the things behind the curtain of the website to improve visibility, traffic, and search engine ranking.

Eventually, I realized he never asked for access to my website domain. I then assumed he built it on a test site and asked him for access to the site files. I never heard back. Michelle stopped responding to my inquiries into her editing progress as well.

My stepmother and I suspected it was a SCAM and did a deeper dive into the people I believed I’d been dealing with. Unlike the first time I looked, this time we discovered warnings of this exact spoofing scam on Penguin’s site as well as that of Fuse Literary.

I’ve assembled all the emails so that other writers will be aware of this scam before they lose time and money as well. I will try to send this to publishers so they can make sure a scammer isn’t ruining the reputation of the publishing house or its staff.

I’ll be submitting this to federal authorities but would appreciate it if you would forward this to every aspiring author you know.

– Bill

A –

Thank you sooooo much for sharing your story to educate other authors! Bless you!!!

This is a classic, multi-tiered “literary/publishing” impersonation scam.

Rosa, a fake editor (she does NOT work for Penguin) referred you to Michelle, a fake literary agent (she does NOT work for Fuse), who referred you to George, a “Query Letter Specialist” (whatever that is!), who referred you to another name, a “Manuscript Designer” (no such thing!), etc.

The fact is, all of those people are the exact same person. And, they were all a dude. Scammers are increasingly using female names because people usually trust women more than men. And they were going to keep “referring” you to “other people” until you ran out of money. Notice they ghosted you when you told them you wouldn’t send any more money. They have now moved onto the next victim.

As long as they can convince their victims that they’re dealing with multiple different professionals, and that those professionals trust each other, they can convince authors to keep sending money to all of those individuals. Again, it’s one person using many names, and also offering payment options under different accounts and names.

You wrote, “The query letter was actually a webpage.”

That’s not how query letters or book proposals work, so that guy clearly didn’t know what he was doing.

You wrote, “I was notified the website was ‘complete’ and took a look. It wasn’t different, but he did show me a report of how much better it was statistically, a screenshot of a report.”

He made up those statistics.

Thank HEAVEN you didn’t give him your website login information! When authors do that, the scammers change the password, and then demand money (extortion!) from the author to get their website back. Of course, no matter how much money the author sends, they never get their website back.

Authors are also giving scammers their login info. for Amazon and other platforms, and losing control over those as well. Worse, the scammers can have the authors’ royalties diverted to the scammers’ bank account(s).

In all likelihood, the scammers are in Nigeria, the Philippines, China or elsewhere overseas. Contacting the FBI and other law enforcement agencies is almost always a waste of them. The only way to combat this is to educate others. And, you’ve done that. 🙂

Thank you again for sharing, Bill! Your story is going to save a LOT of authors money AND save them from heartache!

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