Scammers have turned flattery into a five-minute sales funnel

When a New Zealand writer heard from a “new fan” called Angelo, the approach came with a special invitation that would cost just $150. That price tag is the smartest part of the con. It is small enough to feel like a gamble on your own career rather than a scam, and that is exactly the point.

Fraud aimed at creative professionals is no longer crude. It is cheap to produce, personalised to the target and run with the discipline of a sales team. Anyone who handles their own pitches, invoices and payments, from authors to freelance consultants, should take note.

The scam has a customer database

The clearest evidence comes from a Guardian investigation published in October. NZ-based scam buster Danny de Hek obtained a spreadsheet from a scammer operating out of Karachi, Pakistan, titled “LinkedIn Outreach 2026”. It tracked monthly outreach to targeted authors from March to August this year, sorting 403 names into categories such as new author, cookbook author, religious author, poetry author and NYT bestselling author. Most targets were in the US, with others in Canada, Australia and Europe.

That is not opportunistic crime. It is market segmentation, lead tracking and pipeline management, the same tools a legitimate marketing agency uses. The difference is the product being sold is hope.

AI collapsed the cost of a convincing lie

The economics explain the surge. The Alliance of Independent Authors’ watchdog desk cites IBM research showing a well-targeted scam email now takes an AI tool about five minutes to write, against sixteen hours for a human scammer, a roughly 192-fold cut in production time. Phishing researchers recorded AI-generated scams rising about fourteen-fold in a matter of weeks. As the report puts it, impersonation “used to take skill and patience. Now it takes a name, a book title, and a free AI tool.”

Australian Society of Authors chief executive Lucy Hayward says the latest wave is “far more sophisticated”, because scammers can discuss an author’s actual book. The work “has either already been ingested [by AI companies], or it can be ingested by these AI tools and then summarised.” Flattery used to be generic. Now it is specific, and specific flattery is far harder to dismiss.

Volume is the weapon, not gullibility

Hayward’s sharpest point is that this is not mainly about people being fooled. “It’s the volume of the emails that they are receiving. It becomes very difficult to determine what might be a legitimate offer and what is a scam,” she says. The pitches follow “pig butchering” tactics, leading with praise and small asks before escalating the fees.

New Zealand is firmly on the target list. In April the Auckland Writers Festival warned that scam emails impersonating its team were inviting authors to speak and demanding payment, noting similar scams had hit other festivals and book clubs. The festival never asks authors to pay.

A small fee opens a very large door

The $150 is a filter, not the prize. In 2025, The Post reported an Auckland author who lost about $150,000 over two years across four fake publishing operations, lured with promises of global distribution, paid celebrity interviews, film deals and translations. Scammers kept her card details for repeat charges. The same report noted the US Department of Justice had charged one operation with stealing $44 million from more than 800 writers, and that legitimate book production costs $15,000 to $30,000, a useful benchmark for anyone weighing an unsolicited offer.

Official data tells the same story about where the damage concentrates. In the second quarter of 2025, the National Cyber Security Centre found 50 incidents of $10,000 or more accounted for $5.3 million, or 94% of reported losses. A few patient, high-touch cons do almost all the harm. And reported figures understate the problem: a 2023 survey estimated 10.3% of adults had been scammed in the previous year, implying roughly $397 million in national losses, far above what reaches official channels.

Treat praise like an unexpected invoice

For business, the lesson extends well beyond publishing. Sole traders, consultants, designers and small creative firms have no finance team to sanity-check a payment and no security function to flag a lookalike domain. They are precisely the market this fraud model is built to serve, and the tooling that targets authors today works just as well on a freelance architect or a boutique agency tomorrow.

The defence is unglamorous. Verify any unsolicited opportunity through official channels you find yourself, call back on a known number, ignore urgency, and never pay to be chosen. Genuine festivals, publishers and clients pay you, not the other way round.

The cost of producing a convincing pitch has fallen close to zero and will keep falling. The cost of checking one has not moved. Businesses that build that five-minute verification habit now will spend far less than the ones who learn it from a $150 lesson that becomes a $150,000 one.

Sources

• Stuff: My new fan had a special invitation: Inside the bizarre scam targeting Kiwis (2026-11-15)
• The Guardian: Fake film deals and emails from top agents: who is behind the explosion in literary scams? (2026-10-29)
• Self-Publishing Advice Center: Spammers and Scammers: The Personalized Pitch (2026-07-08)
• Sydney Morning Herald: The rise of AI publishing scams targeting Australian authors (2026-08-13)
• Auckland Writers Festival: Author scam alert (2026-04-02)
• The Post: ‘It’s a horror story’: budding author loses almost $150k to publishing scams (2025-09-13)
• Research Solutions: The crime of the future that’s here today (2023-04-25)