Zealous Writers And The Perils Of Guesting At Online Book Clubs

“The nightingale’s song holds no melody —

It may have for some but certainly not for me

A poet said I must have dirty ears

His melodious words are fancy’s fantasy.”

— From Rubaiyat of Karokaan by Bachchoo

Have you, gentle reader, ever won the Nigerian lottery? I have won it several times, despite never having bought a ticket, though the communicants who want my bank details, so they can deposit the millions I have won, tell me that an anonymous admirer bought a hundred lottery tickets in my name and one of them won.

I don’t send my bank details, such as they are! I confess, I have been tempted to make up account numbers and sort codes from standard UK banks in order to waste the scammer’s time while trying to access money from these. But then I’ve decided not to waste my own time, because there’s no point in trying to make a fool of some idiot who tried to make a fool of me.

Family Motto: “The intelligent must make concessions!”

I’ve received e-mails saying that an estranged, unknown, distant but admiring relative has died and the lawyers executing his will have to send my considerable inheritance, so they need my bank details? The only problem — for them — was that they hadn’t researched Parsi, Zoroastrian first names and sent me these missives saying they were acting for the late ‘Herbert’ or ‘Benjamin’ Dhondy… Vladimir Dhondy???

Did I send my bank details? Has the Pope converted to Zoroastrianism?

In recent months I’ve been the target of three instances of what seems to be a new scam aimed at defrauding writers of books.

Here’s how it works: I get an e-mail from a very Western-sounding correspondent — two females and one male — saying that they have read one of my books and sending me a flattering review. They inevitably say that the book deserves more attention from readers and buyers. Do I disagree? Subsequent emails tell me that they are professional book-promoters and can assure me that, for instance, they can raise the volume of online viewers of my book’s title from, say, 30 to 3,000. What’s not to like?

Then they ask for what seems a fairly modest advance — let’s say $150. They offer to send their bank details so I can make the deposit and they can start the promotion processes.

A variation of this suggestion came from “Distinct Book Club”. The correspondent, with an intriguing name consisting of a very Western first and last names and ‘Ali’ between them.

Distinct offered me a Zoom meeting with thousands of the book club’s members who would be very interested to ask me questions about the ‘content’ of my book. And yes, he wanted an up-front advance in order to set up the Zoom meeting.

What was intriguing about Distinct’s proposal of a Zoom question-and-answer was, how did the purported thousands of members of the book club know what to ask if they hadn’t bought and read the book? I asked ‘Ali’ precisely that and he said one of the members had read the book and told the others about it.

Really?

I think and thought my proposal to both the book promoters and to Distinct was that they should proceed with the promotion and the Zoom and I would pay them by ‘results’. By this I meant that if the promotion resulted in the sale, by the hundreds or thousands, I would get the figures from the publishers of the numbers and the royalty I would earn from the sales. I would, through a watertight contract, give them one third of the royalty I earned.

This was an extremely generous offer as even a few score sales of the titles they were promoting would give them several multiples of the sum they asked for in advance.

Guess what? They all refused this payment-by-resulting-sales offer Instead they insisted on the advance payment. I was at a gathering of writers and the topic turned to promotion. Two of whom said the scammers didn’t want the small advance but wanted the bank details or debit/credit card details attached.

They would use these for criminal extraction, even using overdraft limits which banks offered these accounts.

What was remarkable was that when I said I would pay the advances demanded, and asked for their bank details, they all came back with bank accounts in the name of distinctly Nigerian individuals.

My daughter Tir Dhondy is a TV investigative journalist and presenter. One of the docs she made for the BBC is called Sexploitation and involves a Nigerian slum gang who post false porn to white lads in Europe and the US and when they reciprocate with porn pictures of themselves, they blackmail them, demanding money. One victim of this blackmail committed suicide which started Tir’s investigation.

I have asked two of my book-promotion con-persons if they would be interviewed for a documentary about book-promotion scams. Answer came there none!

The Sexploitation gang wrote extremely idiomatic and plausible emails posing as girls wanting porn and sex. My book-promotion correspondents are also extremely efficient, polite, flattering communicators. One of them wants a photograph of my transaction details when I send the advance. That could contain my bank details.

So, gentle reader, what shall I do?