Scammers flood authors with AI-written fake fan mail
Joe Dunthorne answers back and finds the Berlin book club wants CashApp, impersonated Moshfegh and Tartt steer writers toward Amazon pages, mass flattery costs almost nothing when models are trained on the books
Author Joe Dunthorne receives multi-paragraph fan mail almost every day — flattering, specific, and fake. The senders sign off with names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton, write from Barcelona, Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw, praise his novels' "deadpan genius" and his nonfiction's "moral courage", and offer to promote his work through city-wide book clubs if he transfers a few hundred dollars to cover costs. In the Guardian, Dunthorne reports that most writers he knows receive the same steady stream, engineered well enough to bypass spam filters.
The genre has a recognizable arc. A writer friend told him the reason she knows the emails are fake is that the senders have actually read all her books. The praise is calibrated to what an author most wants to hear, then pivots to money. One scammer posing as the founder of a Berlin book club wanted payment via CashApp or a direct bank transfer; Dunthorne insisted he could only send hard cash, and the two spent days going back and forth over payment methods before the exchange collapsed.
The impersonations extend beyond fans. Dunthorne received a gushing email appearing to come from Ottessa Moshfegh, the Booker-shortlisted author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, explaining that her new novel was "preoccupied with interior life: how emotions register, how they fail to, and what that absence or excess does to identity over time" — and that the best way to understand her work was to explore her Amazon page. Other writers report the same treatment from fake Donna Tartt and fake Sally Rooney.
The economics behind it are familiar. Last year Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion in compensation to thousands of authors whose copyrighted work was used to train Claude, and in July publishers sued Google for what the suit calls one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted material in history. The same language models trained on authors' books now write letters back to them — personalized, admiring, and nearly free to produce at scale.
Writers answer their readers; that is what the letters are designed to reach. Dunthorne's fake Moshfegh asked him to buy her book.