Patrick Radden Keefe, the best-selling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, both adapted into critically acclaimed television series, has become accustomed to a daily ritual that has nothing to do with writing. It involves scanning his inbox, identifying the latest batch of elaborately crafted scam emails, and deleting them. “Every morning I wake up to two or three of these emails,” Keefe told The Hollywood Reporter in March 2026. Dan Brown, whose The Da Vinci Code has sold more than 80 million copies, has taken to sharing particularly egregious examples on Facebook. Neither fame nor decades of publishing experience offers immunity. The scammers do not discriminate; they simply scale.
What has changed is not the existence of publishing fraud, which has plagued authors for as long as there have been authors, but the sheer velocity and personalisation of the attacks. Generative AI has handed the global scam industry a set of tools that transform what was once a crude, spray-and-pray operation into something resembling a bespoke concierge service for deception. The emails arrive with flattering assessments of an author's prose style, detailed references to specific books, and proposals wrapped in the language of legitimate publishing. They are, in the words of Victoria Strauss, the veteran watchdog behind Writer Beware, evidence that “generative AI has become embedded in the world of overseas writing fraud.”
