FBI Arrests Individuals Behind PageTurner Scam
January 10, 2025
Member Alert: Podcast Ploy Seeks to Take Advantage of Authors
February 1, 2025
We were recently made aware of a new email scam targeting authors with fake offers for paid podcast interviews. Authors are contacted with the promise of participating in interviews on topics that may seem relevant and important to their work, with the added inducement of being paid for doing so. In some instances, the emails appear to come from podcasts with some notoriety, some of which have hosts who are authors themselves. This angle likely aims to provide some legitimacy and intrigue to the offer, albeit falsely.
Authors have reported being offered at least $2,000 for an hour-long podcast, while other solicitations simply state that the appearance would be “paid” or that the podcast would be able to “offer compensation.” The emails attempt to leverage the author’s ability to reach a wide audience—in some instances 2 million listeners—a key attraction for authors looking to expand their reach that the scammers appear to be aware of.
Currently, little is known about the reason for or end goal of this particular ploy, but discussions online surmise it to be an attempt to gain personal and financial information. While no one has reported being compromised by these solicitations, all authors should continue to exercise caution and vet offers before sharing personal and financial information.
In some ways, the podcast ploy mirrors a scam we previously alerted authors to that related to fake solicitations for radio interviews. In that case, authors were asked to pay for airtime with a particular, popular radio show and host. That ploy similarly attempted to leverage the ability of the show to platform the author and reach a larger audience, leading them to believe that such a partnership would lead to increased book sales. Instead, the victims lost thousands of dollars without the benefit of any interviews.
While the podcast ploy only seeks to potentially piece together personal and financial information rather than gain an actual financial benefit like the radio interview offer, the thread for the two are the same—taking advantage of authors by exploiting their desire to engage with their audiences.
When considering this kind of scam, authors should be alert and pay attention to some potential cues, which often signal that an untoward opportunity is around the corner:
- Names that you cannot match with real staff or employees
- Requests that you send money for a service or that you will receive money for services that generally are unpaid
- Fictious-looking email addresses that use generic domain indicators rather than company domains
- Typos and badly written communications
If you are a victim of a scam, please contact the appropriate law enforcement to report fraud or scams. Authors Guild members may also reach out to our legal department for more information.
Scams are an unfortunate reality in the publishing world. If you’ve come across or done business with a publishing scam, please email us at staff@authorsguild.org so we can assist you and let our members know to avoid it. You can read previous publishing scam alerts here.