A Scammer Wants Us DEAD! AGAIN!! – by Brian Whiddon, Managing Editor

Perhaps I should have titled this “How to Make Friends and Influence People – the WritersWeekly Way!” But then, who would have clicked on that title?

WritersWeekly has been in business 28 years. Angela has received her share of threats – including death threats – throughout that time. You would think that just publishing books and writing about writing would be a rather safe lane to be in. Who could possibly be so pissed off at you as to want you dead? But, the world is full of nut-jobs. And Angela seems to be a sort of magnet for them. You can simply never tell what is going to set someone off.

Seriously, we could come onto WritersWeekly and post an article that says “Writing is a LOT of fun, and we LOVE it!” and somebody would develop a seething hatred from the 7th plain of Hell against us.

Then, somewhere along the line, we started exposing international scammers, and educating our readers on how to avoid being scammed…and BANG! It’s like we’ve become Osama Bin Laden on the Navy Seals’ hit list!

Well, to be honest, we aren’t just on WritersWeekly telling our readers about how to avoid scams. We talk a lot about it on on The WritersWeekly Podcast, which you should ALL be listening to if you aren’t already. (Go ahead… I’ll wait while you bookmark it on Apple Podcasts for your next cross-country car trip.)

Angela also spends a LOT of time on social media pointing out and directly confronting scammers in front of everybody when they post in groups and on PMs. It seems to be working. More and more, we’re seeing scammers come in and say, “Hey everyone! Post a photo of your cover!” or “I’m offering bargain editing services – PM me!” – and they are getting smothered with responses of “SCAMMER!!!” from members of those groups. So, the education we’ve been sharing with authors has led to good things for authors and to scammers losing multi millions of dollars!

And the result? We get emails threatening that the scammer is going to come kill us.

However, the grammar is always very bad, so it’s more like, “I going to be come and kill you like dead!”

Very hard to take seriously.

But this week, we got quite the doozy. Here it is unedited:

Not much grey area there, I agree. But you have to look at the bright side of things. I see this as a sure sign that someone is losing so much money from our advocacy working concerning writing and publishing scams that they really don’t want us to educate authors anymore. So, as far as we’re concerned, I’d have to say the glass is half full, no?

Now, one thing that shocked me is that there is literally a website devoted entirely to allowing people to write and send anonymous emails. What could go wrong there?

All you do is go to the site, fill out the recipient’s email address, fill out the message box, and hit send. Voila! Someone receives an anonymous email from “donotreply@anonymousemail.com” with whatever nastiness you had to say in the message field. I can’t imagine ANY positive use for such a service. However, Angela reached out to them and their corporate office and they are cooperating.

We have been in touch with local law enforcement and the FBI, and they are taking it seriously. That’s all I can say. (You know, national security and all.)

But what really troubles me is the part that says, “SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS SO THEY RAPE AND CUT THE THROATS OF YOUR FAMILY FIRST RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES BEFORE THEY BUMP YOU OFF!”

I mean – that ‘s ME!

I’m “the family.” Nobody else lives with us. And I really don’t feel like being raped. If you have to kill me, I get it. After all, that’s just the way it is in some of those third world hellholes.

But getting raped in front of Angela would just be embarrassing! And what’s worse, I doubt they’ll send a woman over to do the actual raping before they kill me. That means the hit-MAN will be raping me. I mean, come on guys – I simply don’t swing that way!

Then there’s the chronology. Did you catch that they threatened to kill us, and THEN flood our company page with negative reviews? Seriously, what’s the point? I mean, we’re already dead. It’s not like we’re going to get to witness the downfall of our business.

But wait. Perhaps these guys ARE criminal masterminds. You see, we own WritersWeekly.com – lock, stock, and barrel (pun intended). Any comments that appear on either site are only there because we allow them. If we’re dead, then we’re not around to delete all those negative reviews!

AHA!! Absolute GENIUS!

And what’s this??? “YOU MUST NEVER BE SEEN ONLINE AGAIN PROMOTING ANYTHING NOW OR IN NEAR FUTURE.“

Well, what about the FAR future? What if we take a month-long vacation? THEN can we come back and promote stuff online? The camper is cleaned up and ready to go. Maybe we can slip off to the Grand Canyon and then maybe swing by Disneyland for the near future, and then we can get back to exposing scammers. Would that work?

Finally, I’m curious. Are there, in fact, serial killers and rapists for hire? Were Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy placing ads for their services? Is there a Craigslist for actual serial killers? Doesn’t that kind of take the fun out of being a serial killer – having to work for someone else? I always thought serial killers and rapists were mostly in it for the thrills. If you start putting yourself out there for hire, you have to worry about things like customer satisfaction, performance rating, and benefits. Doesn’t sound fun at all. Now you’re just another working class schlub like the rest of us. Where’s the thrill in that?

And consider this: IF you were a serial killer/rapist for hire, would YOU want to work for a foreign scammer? Can you imagine how that would work??

“I’ll pay you $10,000 to bump off Angela Hoy. But first, you’ll have to send me $1,500 in Bitcoin to this bank account in Lagos. Once you do the job, I’ll need you to buy $5000 in Amazon gift cards, scratch off the backs and take photos of the redeem codes, and email them to me. Then I’ll need YOUR bank routing and account number so I can send your money.”

So, if Angela and I are dead – in the near future – rest assured it was probably some disgruntled scammer who got all butt-hurt because we were putting a major crimp on his profits. And while you’re pondering that, just pray that they didn’t rape me – because that simply wouldn’t be very nice.

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Brian Whiddon is the Managing Editor of WritersWeekly.com and the Operations Manager at BookLocker.com. An Army vet and former police officer, Brian is the author of Blue Lives Matter: The Heart behind the Badge. He's an avid sailor, having lived and worked aboard his 36-foot sailboat, the “Floggin’ Molly” for 9 years after finding her abandoned in a boat yard and re-building her himself. Now, in northern Georgia, when not working on WritersWeekly and BookLocker, he divides his off-time between hiking, hunting, and farming.

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