I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)(rwwgreene.substack.com) |
I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)(rwwgreene.substack.com) |
It ended up that these girls would ask him for money, and he drained his savings accounts giving money to these “girls”, and even after running out of money, he kept believing these girls were real, they wanted to know him as a person, and that they just needed a little money to help out.
Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them. He would briefly relent, delete all his messaging apps these scammers were using to contact him, then he would feel lonely or what not, reinstall the apps, and resume contact with the scammers. It didn’t matter how many times we told him they weren’t real. It didn’t matter how much money he lost from these scammers pitching their wares to him.
He just stubbornly believed these were actual young girls who wanted to be his friend, no matter how many people told him they weren’t real, that he was just setting himself up to be scammed yet again.
I had to break contact with him. It just really angered me that this guy couldn’t believe something as basic as these girls actually being African/Southeast Asian/etc. scammers and not real people wanting to get to know him.
They're not inventing a new world, they're not "conveniently" and consciously sweeping anything under the rug, they're not telling themselves a fairy tale. They're just losing much of the world they were living in and have to deal with what's left, holes and all. Why do you think old people are such easy targets for scams and fraud in general? Do you think only the body degrades with age?
If you're young enough to not have seen this in action ever, you'd be excused for not understanding at all what happens and for building such bad faith scenarios. Common sense and some light reading on the topic would have prevented that nonetheless.
It possibly could have been a bot, but I don't think bots commonly use profile pictures of dishevelled looking 75 year old men. Maybe for commenting on political agitprop, they do...
Ironically, instead of breaking contact, maybe the solution would have been to be there for him more.
I knew a man and a woman who were in a couple and they were like this, they would believe anything that people told them because they were significantly mentally impaired and had some sort of psychological problem that was unclear. They could be taken advantage of by anyone.
It was pretty sad, in fact the best thing for them was if they were only slightly taken advantage of by people who then had an interest in taking care of them to keep the advantage taking going.
Like if someone drained this guy's back account halfway, but made sure no one else drained it, and came to see him every now and then sent him a nice greeting card. I know that sounds pretty weird to claim but I saw it with this couple, they were essentially protected and controlled by the people who took a little long term advantage, basically because the American system just lets you lose everything and go live on the streets and die if you can't take care of yourself, but if people who need a place to stay come stay with you and make sure your money gets spent on food for everyone they're actually better off. It was sad to see but also the best possible outcome given the miserable situation for them.
Anyway, these people were not fixable by being talked to, and it wasn't because they had spent so many years deluding themselves. It was because they had real problems that meant they could never understand some things.
When he realizes he's committed a terrible crime, the next day he goes back to believing he's a US marshal. His last words:
- this place makes me wonder...
+ Yeah, what's that, boss?
- Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
This is a sad reality of life, that leads many, to choose a fantasy over reality. How many of us consistently avoid this trap?
Given he had family, one remedy would have been to establish a guardianship/conservatorship on the basis of mental/financial incompetence.
We don't need voter id or age verification laws, we need laws that make any form of deliberate online deception for profit a crime punishable by jail time.
Luckily I came to realise after my first book that writing was not about the sales (though that was the starting goal), but about finally putting all my ideas into a bunch of characters and having them live the life and fantasies I never could in a world I created. I got an email out of the blue this week from somebody who read my free sci-fi novel and liked it, such small things really makes the journey worth it.
One of the great things about SMTP and email is that a spammer can really never be sure whether a person opened or read an email. Many SMTP will silently accept emails and not inform the sender or auto-generate a reject bounce that a recipient's address doesn't even exist. Unless the reader opens an email and loads some active html content, image, 1x1 px pixel, etc, the sender can never know.
When you start responding with hand crafted emails back to a spam farm all you've done is successfully mark your email address as "there is a live human reading this and they will reply" in some spammer's database.
yeah, it was quite visible in style (in parts that I bothered to read)
Claude: "Hold my beer."
This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.
why anyone would respond to spammers, if they recognize them as spammers? And want them to stop spamming?
Having said that, less technically minded people, as authors may be, may not even notice that.
I don't think he replies to all spam emails.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the book marketing scammers are one or two groups of people that just haven't thought to target French authors yet. But basically any creative endeavor in the Anglosphere has its own attendant scammer ecosystem.
Or who knows, maybe the Francosphere just doesn't have the algorithmic gatekeepers the Anglosphere has.
Was it bad or scandalous, or did you mean “renown” instead of “notoriety”?
What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.
If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction.
Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling.
[0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness.
[1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.
> I wasn’t being marketed to. I was being carpet-bombed.
Three in a row directly followed by a juxtaposition containing a weird metaphor (shouldn't it be "bombarded" instead of "carpet-bombed"?)
Good luck selling books.
And more AI-isms. I think we finally found ground zero: the original author whose work was used to train the LLMs.
presumably it stands for "I asked LLM to write it for me"
a) There's a gate-keeper who picks winners, and charges money. Maybe book publising, maybe academic papers, maybe music - whatever.
b) producers complain - these parasites are sucking all the money out the ecosystem, and adding no value. We need to bypass the gate-keepers. Go to market directly.
c) The "indie" scene becomes legit. Barriers to entry drop. Consumers can find creators directly. There's no middle man.
d) The indie scene bcomes popular. Everyone can publish an academc paper, or record a song, or write a book. (Of course 99% of it is rubbish, because, well, most of everything we create is rubbish)
e) along come the "guides" - folks who'll teach, or promote, or review or whatever. Most of that is of (let's be generous) "marginal quality" - assuming it's not just an outright scam (which it probably is.)
Turns out those gatekeepers were indeed providing something of value. But because they rejected almost everyone, and because they charged real money, they were disliked by creator and consumer alike. ah well...
Ultimately of course, for the 99% of us, the fun is in the creation not the result. There's no money in creating (and for the 99% never has been). Enjoy the process - if someone likes it, great. Will you make our living doing this? Almost certainly not.
1. Obtain data on what kinds of people enjoy which books, movies, music, etc
2. Train a neural network to predict the sampled distribution. Because that distribution already contains a lot of data for the most popular works, and less for less other works, the model is trained with a bias for already popular works. Conversely, less-popular or niche works may be forgotten completely by the model.
3. Deploy the model. Because the model has a bias to predict certain already-popular works, it will recommend them more often, while the ones with little data in the set are recommended less. This changes the true distribution of the data.
4. Repeat. Take new sampled data from modified distribution and train a new model on that distribution.
As a result of applying this cycle multiple times, the tails drop out. People don't watch or read niche works, so they get forgotten. This is ostensibly fixable, you could bias the model towards less well-known works, but it's more profitable to just make people pay to boost their posts. Bonus points: people who pay to boost are also polluting the model with a bunch of negative data about their work, so they are self-selecting into a class of easy marks who don't get recommended because they keep paying to show in front of people who don't want it.
you missed step that proves or indicates that
For those wondering what book. Here is the trilogy. Free for download: https://rodyne.com/?p=1252
Naturally I was mortified.
But I wonder how much of it is just "Fuck it, I'm an old man, I'm gonna let my creep flag fly."
You need to reign in your ageism sunshine.
But, I was in my latest teens, earliest twenties; I could have been misreading the situation. All I can say for certain is I was uncomfortable.
So either I click and it may delete me, or it will confirm my address is real. I err on the side of not clicking, but I'm sure many less technically minded colleagues make the click.
If this sounds surprising to you then probably you have enough money that you don’t need to give all of it away to be less sad.
Honestly the main problem is one of efficiency not whether buying happiness with money is a bad idea. Being less sad is more important than having money, but you do need to plan ahead so you don't run out too quickly.