Actually, I’m not sure these scams are new, but they are new to me, and since people seem to be interested in this kind of thing, I’ll write about them.
I’ve been super busy lately (hence, very few blog posts, sorry!) so my junk mailboxes have really piled up. Tonight I finally got ahead enough that I could take a few minutes to go through them, and as I did, I took note of two scam emails. The first is one I had just read about earlier today: an invitation from a writer friend. Just click the link to find out more!
Of course, it’s not really from my friend who lives in Houston and to the best of my knowledge isn’t visiting. I had read about these fake invitations, and how when you do open the invitaiton, the link might not take you anywhere, but a virus will attack your computer. Or the link takes you somewhere and you’re asked to login, which gives the criminals your email credentials.
If I ever send an invitation from a place like punchbowl, I guess I had better be much more specific before I ask anyone to open my invitation.
The other scam I encoutnered may not be a scam at all, but I suspect it is. The email makes it look like an agent is interested in my book. I write poetry, so I doubt that Amazon optimization is going to help me sell a ton of books. If it did, that’d be great, but it’s probably not worth the investment
One dead giveawaty that this isn’t a real agency is that the address is a gmail address. Now, I have a few gmail accounts, but I dont’ use them for an agency. Then there’s the fact that Lantern Literary claims to represent authors of historical ficion. That’s not who I am.
It’s a shame that these kinds of scams make me mistrust every email from poeple I don’t know and even from people I do know.
Stay safe out there! Don’t click links in email, at least not until you have verified who it is from adn whether you can trust it.
Kendall Dunkelberg 