Authors tend to be inundated with scammers. My biggest ones at the moment are fake book club emails and book marketers. All fake, most coming from Nigeria according to their IP addresses. Most of them are obviously AI written, though that illusion falls away the second you say you aren’t interested…then the true, very broken English emerges. I sometimes amuse myself with these types for a couple of emails, then shut them down.
One set, however, genuinely puzzled me until today.
It’s not unusual for these scammers to get my book wrong. A lot of them call it Melusine’s Endgame. That’s not the book…that’s the name of the series. A lot have flat out said they loved reading my books and want to drop a review. It’s kind of hard to read something that doesn’t release for another five months or so. This series of emails, however, threw me. If I had to guess, they were written by the same person. I am starting to think that it’s a relatively small number of actual people doing the scamming, but they change up their emails so often it’s hard to tell. The text is often nearly identical.
Anyway, I got several emails that referenced my book as Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, & Interpretation Of The Hebrew Bible In Ancient Judaism & Early Christianity. Obviously, this is not my work. So why had I gotten about a half dozen emails along that vein? My first thought was that it was a made-up title to be used for bait. So, I did a quick copy-paste Google search.
Turns out, it is a real book, though not the kind I would write. It appears to be a scholarly study of the Hebrew Bible. That is so far out of my wheelhouse it’s in a different hemisphere. Why did this particular title keep cropping up in reference to me?
Oh, that’s why.
The editor’s name is Harry Sysling.
It would appear that the names ‘Hilary Sifling’ and ‘Harry Sysling’ are similar enough to make people think we are the same person.
Cripes.
For the record, I do not write academic material. I write paranormal romance and YA in various genres. Scammers, you may wish to do some actual research, okay? It makes you look dumber and lazier than you already do when you can’t even figure out what books your target authored.