The fake book club scam: how it tricks authors into paying for events that don't exist

According to Guardian News and Media, authors are being contacted by fake book clubs that invite them to online discussions of their own work, then ask for a payment once the invitation has been accepted.

The approach lands as flattery. Author Snigdha Poonam received an email addressed to “Professor Snigdha Poonam” from someone calling himself Timothy Firth, who said he ran a Seattle life-drawing community with 1,943 members. The group wanted to discuss her book, Dreamers, published seven years earlier, at an upcoming meetup. Attendees would be encouraged to post reviews on Goodreads and Amazon afterwards.

How the approach works

The email came with real-looking detail. A search turned up an events page and an Instagram account for the group, with photos of a white male Timothy Firth and testimonials praising his community work. A second email followed with a polished Zoom poster using the book's cover and blurbs from the Economist and other outlets. Buried in that email was a request for a “contribution fee”, no amount given, to cover promotion, coordination and administration.

The email asking for money was not signed by Timothy. It was signed by someone calling himself Stephen, “Organiser, Community Improv LA”, a different group in a different city, but sent from Timothy's email address. Stephen also left a line in the email that read as an instruction to an AI tool: “MAKE IT MORE PROFESSIONAL.”

The scam depends on the author never checking who is actually asking for the money. Two invented identities, two invented clubs, one email account. The names and groups shift between messages, but the request for payment stays constant, and the author is meant to be too pleased at the invitation to notice the inconsistency.

The tell

Genuine book clubs do not ask authors for money to be discussed. That is the simplest signal here. A second signal is the mismatch between sender and signature: an email that arrives from one name but is signed by another is not a typo, it is two people, or one person running two scripts.

Poonam, who has spent ten years reporting on transnational fraud, agreed to pay the club, but only after the event rather than before it. Stephen explained the name mix-up as a typing error and sent a Google Meet link for the discussion.

The specific amount requested is not stated in the source, and whether the Zoom event or the life-drawing group's online presence was itself fabricated to support the request is also not addressed. What is clear from the sequence is that the fee request always arrives separately from the invitation, timed for after interest has already been built.