John Dean – Crime Writer

Like many authors, I receive all sorts of emails on a daily basis, most of them selling services such as promotion of my books, perfectly genuine but basically sales pitches.

Others are obviously scams, some patently obvious as they demand money from the outset, but some are  more subtle.

I can usually spot them but sometimes they can blindside me (as a journalist, I wrote on the topic of Internet security  for years, warning people about  the danger signs but even I sometimes get caught out).

That happened this week when I was emailed by what appeared to be a best-selling children’s author (a big, big name). This interested me because, in addition to my crime fiction, I would love to have my children’s books published and the ‘author’ asked for nothing, no money, had nothing to sell,  just wanted a chat author-to-author. His/her/it – if you can call AI a his/her/it  -reason for emailing is that he (etc)  liked my recently-published guide to writing fiction.

I still could not see the scam so I tried putting his name and the word ‘scam’ into Google (oh, yes, folks, don’t tell me that I did not learn some sophisticated investigative techniques during my years writing on Internet security – my creations DCI John Blizzard and Jack Harris would be proud of me!) and there they were, pages of authors’ warnings which said the author’s name had been hijacked by scammers.

So what do we do as authors? The email was very complimentary and I was flattered (and I like to think I am immune to false flattery but it is, I am afraid, warning sign number 1). Is abuse of the web turning us all into suspicious creatures? I am afraid that the answer is, to extent, yes. But that is how it must be. It’s a bleak message, I know, but authors have to proceed with extreme caution. Sad but true.