At Britain’s Daily Sceptic, we learn about a sophisticated AI scam targeting writers in particular. Historian Guy de la Bédoyère points out that sophisticated AI tools can tailor an email so that is sounds personal — a far cry from the junkmail that ends up in our recycle bins:

Several months ago, I had an email forwarded to me by one of my publishers. It included the following: “One of your authors, Guy de la Bedoyere, has kindly agreed to talk to Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution about his book Populus, published by Abacus, on October 20th.

“We have recently had some difficulty in communicating with him, and I would be grateful if you could confirm that this is his correct email address.”

It then gave an entirely spurious email address. I smelled a rat immediately because I knew I’d made no such arrangement, nor ever even heard of it before. As it turned out, this opened the door to an extraordinary new phenomenon proliferating in the publishing world. In this instance the organisation is (or appears to be) a real one but I could find no trace of the sender, whose own email address had no connection to the domain he purported to be connected to. Naturally, I didn’t follow it up.

Only a few days later, another email popped into my inbox, this time forwarded by a relative who runs a small publishing house. Bizarrely, they’d been sent a request to contact me by a supposedly Liverpool-based association called “The North West Writing Club”, allegedly made up of 3,000 “active readers”, despite having never published any of my books. The email purported to be from someone called “Taylor Wright” and was blatantly lifted from AI content.

“AI Scams Are Becoming a Big Problem,” July 14, 2026

A writer need not be important in the industry in order to be a target. Urgent author guidance has been issued at The Bookseller:

… the rise of AI means scams are taking “more sophisticated and convincing forms”, with fraudsters impersonating agents, publishers, big-name authors, publicists and marketing providers, and using AI to scrape online reviews and book summaries to give the impression that they have read an author’s work. Other tactics flagged in the guidance include AI-generated fake company websites with staff profiles and testimonials, pressurising sales tactics, urgent deadlines and upselling.

The guidance also warns that fraudsters have become sophisticated enough to change the telephone number that appears when a call is made, with caller ID matching, for example, an author’s bank name or number. “May 18, 2026”

Random thought: If you write for a living and your neighbors do not think you are especially important, be very wary of unknown voices landing in your inbox, claiming that you are.