A Fake Book Club Is Charging Authors Up to $420 for a "Spotlight" That Doesn't Exist

A Fake Book Club Is Charging Authors Up to $420 for a "Spotlight" That Doesn't Exist

Sarah Barnes, the author of Meredith & Me — a memoir about raising her daughter with special needs — recently received an email she almost didn't question. It praised her book in warm, specific detail, called her story "heart-wrenching and profoundly uplifting," and invited her to be featured at the Books & Bites Club in Seattle and the Broadbeach Library Club in Australia. The catch: for a "spotlight package," she'd need to pay between $250 and $420.

The email had no human signature, which Barnes and other authors who've seen similar pitches say is a telling sign of AI involvement. What makes this scam harder to spot than most is that both the Books & Bites Club and the Broadbeach Library are real organizations — their names were used without their knowledge, drawing legitimate groups into a fraud they had no part in creating. The flattery in the email was precisely tailored to the book's subject matter, suggesting the scammer (or the AI tool behind it) had done at least minimal research before sending.

Barnes wrote publicly about the experience to warn other authors, noting that writers who have spent years documenting their family's struggles — often hoping to shift public understanding of disability — may be especially vulnerable to a pitch promising a wider audience. The cruelty, as she put it, is that the scam targets the very hope that motivated the writing in the first place.

If you or someone you know has received a similar pitch, do not pay. The FTC accepts reports at reportfraud.ftc.gov.

Gobble's Take: An email that flatters you by name and knows your book's subject is doing exactly what it was designed to do — the personalization is the trap, not the proof of legitimacy.

Source: MyDifferentRoad (Substack)

Scammers Can Clone a Voice From a Few Seconds of Audio — and the Call Will Look Like It Comes From Someone You Trust

A pattern documented by cybersecurity firm Group-IB describes how fraudsters are combining two techniques to impersonate people over the phone: AI voice cloning, which can produce a convincing replica of someone's voice using only a short audio sample taken from public sources such as social media, and caller ID spoofing, which makes the incoming call appear to come from a trusted number. Together, according to Group-IB's research, the result is a call that sounds like a family member, employer, or official — and displays the name to match.

To demonstrate how accessible this has become, Group-IB and the news outlet Channel News Asia ran a controlled experiment in which a journalist's voice was cloned using a publicly available online platform. The experiment showed that realistic voice replicas can be generated quickly and at low cost, and that no specialized technical skill is required. The research describes the tactic as "deepfake vishing" — vishing being voice-based phishing, where the goal is typically to get the target to transfer money, hand over sensitive information, or allow remote access to a device.

The practical implication for families: a voice alone is no longer sufficient verification that you are speaking with who you think you are. Group-IB's research points to stronger identity verification as a key defense — meaning it's reasonable to establish a family code word or a callback procedure before any urgent phone request is acted on.

Gobble's Take: "It sounded exactly like them" is no longer a reason to trust a phone call — that's precisely what the technology is designed to produce.

Source: Group-IB

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• AI scams are getting slicker, and families are squarely in the crosshairs