Genre Grapevine: Book Club Scams Are a Warning of Emerging AI Super-Scams
My novella We Who Hunt Alexanders was recently published by Apex Books. So when someone calling herself Melissa W. Speier emailed saying, “Jason, you magnificent fiend of speculative fiction, We Who Hunt Alexanders isn’t just a story, it’s a moral workout for the soul.” – yeah, I grinned at that. What author doesn’t love praise for their stories?
But then I kept reading and realized I’d been suckered – triggering a visceral reaction or emotion is one of the basic ways scammers trick people. As I read more of Speier’s email I recognized the generative AI slop that’s enabling so many scammers these days. And Speier’s profile photo in the email, yeah, also AI generated (as shown by such AI detectors such as Undetectable AI, WasItAI, and SightEngine).
The email from Speier was pure scam.
Speier was offering what’s being called the book club scam, something a large number of authors have received in recent weeks. Speier claimed to be the “curator of a private community of over 2,000 readers who devour books like caffeine addicts in a library” and offered to share my book with those readers.
For a price, of course.
Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware recently wrote a must-read report on how these book club and book review scams work. As Strauss said, sometimes these so-called book clubs are using the name of a real club; other times, they’re totally fictional.
According to Strauss,
“The catch, as you’ll doubtless have guessed, is that the author has to pay a fee for their appearance, variously described as a ‘spot fee’ or a ‘spotlight fee’ or a ‘spot-securing fee’ or a ‘participation fee’. (Needless to say, real book clubs don’t charge fees to their guests). Amounts reported to me range from $55 to $350. In one case, the scammer offered three ‘spotlight packages’: Basic, Essential, and Premium, for between $100 and $200.”
Definitely read Stauss’ entire report. An important point that Strauss makes is that while in recent decades most writing scams focused on newer writers or authors who’d self-published, these book club scams target every writer including authors who are traditionally published.
Basically, if you have a published book, you’re a target.
Because of this, I decided to do a deep dive into these scams. Meaning, yeah, I responded to Melissa Speier with interest in her offer. But I had no idea how deep my dive would go, or how much it would reveal about the potential for scams to be superpowered by artificial intelligence.
AI Discord Communities Love Your Writing!
After I responded positively to Speier, she sent this follow-up email. Basically, she said my book would be shared with 2,000 readers who “provide detailed, sincere reviews on platforms like Goodreads and Amazon.” In return I would “give each reader a small token of thanks, typically $20–$25.”
So far this scam followed what I’d read in Strauss’ Writer Beware report. However, everything took a new turn when Speier offered to let me see the Discord where their so-called community interacted with each other and discussed books.
After receiving an invite to the Supper Books readers Discord, I quickly started exploring and screenshotting everything. The Discord was created on September 1, 2025, with the first message posted by a user named Suppermark. This user would later turn out to be one of the so-called group’s “community organizers.”
As I explored the Discord, it was obvious that this wasn’t a community with 2,000 readers. When I asked about this discrepancy I was told that this was a limited channel where community leaders interacted with authors before their books were allowed to be shared with the entire community. While you can set up Discord channels this way, I noticed the channel I was in was the default “general” channel all Discords have when they are created. If the Discord truly had 2,000 users, that default channel likely wouldn’t have been used simply to talk to potential authors.
Instead of 2,000 users, the Supper Books readers Discord had just over a dozen “community leader” users. When I first logged in these users immediately began welcoming me and asking questions such as what inspired my writing and if anyone had discouraged me from becoming an author. The users were almost falling over each other to post comments praising me and asking questions, with multiple users literally posting at the same time.
As I explored the Discord, I quickly determined most of the users were fake. First, most of the users asking questions or interacting with me used their full names and images of themselves instead of avatars, something most users on Discord don’t do. In addition, when I ran the profile photos of these users through AI detector programs, they registered as highly likely to be AI generated.
Second, as I explored the Discord I saw how these users interacted with other authors. The questions and comments directed at authors were almost always relatively generic, as if the people behind Supper Books either used an AI text generator or were AI chatbots.
My sense is there were two possibilities here. First, there were a couple of real people using multiple Discord accounts to interact with authors and these people used AI generated text and images to create the illusion of an active Discord. However, the second option is also a possibility, namely that AI chat bots were being extensively used. While that would take more programming work, we currently are seeing other online communities such as Reddit being overrun with similar chatbots.
The only actual people I could confirm on the Discord was the user named Suppermark and authors who’d been invited to take part. I counted around a dozen authors who’d joined the Discord since September 1. Some of them popped into the Discord and never interacted again. Others talked at length with the users. These authors used more typical Discord usernames and avatars associated with actual people and wrote what could easily be seen as actual human-written responses.
Some of the other authors were also suspicious of what was going on here. One author even said they were not “comfortable with AI generated communications.“ In response the likely AI-generated users / chatbots kept denying they were AI.
I’ve redacted the names of other authors in any screenshots I’ve shared. However, one author who said I could quote him is the environmental author David Sobel. Sobel came into the Discord before I did and interacted with the users for a while before leaving. He later told me he didn’t send the scammers any money.
When I asked Sobel what convinced him it was a scam, he said, “The organizer suggested that the readers she was convening were all enthusiastic about the book of mine we were going to talk about. When I got on the chat, it was clear that none of the ‘readers’ knew a thing about the book.”
This ties in with what I realized each time Melissa Speier and the other users talked about my book. While Speier’s initial email appears to be from someone who read We Who Hunt Alexanders, a closer look shows that the details about my book are both specific and generic along with saying a lot without saying much at all. This is a pattern seen frequently with AI-generated copy. It appears someone used a program like ChatGPT to write the remarks about my book.
I wanted to explore the Discord in more depth, but the scammers quickly began to get impatient with me. I was told they had other authors scheduled to come into the Discord so if I didn’t have time to ask questions now, they’d need to reschedule me. In response to this, I asked various questions including if I had to pay upfront for the reviews.
Suppermark replied, “You pay our tip up front. Once your payment is available, we’ll start reading your book.”
Based on my interactions with Suppermark, I believe this was an account used by an actual person, possibly the scammer behind all this. Unlike the other non-author users in the Discord, Suppermark spoke and interacted with others like an actual person.
The users quickly pushed me to agree to $20 per review for 40 readers/reviews. I agreed to pay for the reviews, expecting this would lead to more discussions.
Instead, I was kicked out of the Discord.
Who Is Behind the Scams?
When I was kicked out of the Discord, I thought I’d messed up and they’d figured out I was investigating the group. However, to my surprise Melissa Speier emailed again and said a contract was being sent to me. She also explained that they only allowed authors to stay in Discord for a limited time because they have other authors who are scheduled to arrive.
A few minutes later an email arrived from Emmanuel Ibukunoluwa Bankole through the Upwork platform for freelancers. Victoria Strauss’ Writer Beware report discussed how these scams frequently use this platform and how she also traced these scams back to operators in Nigeria.
I emailed Speier back and said I couldn’t access the Upwork invoice. Instead, I asked if I could do a bank transfer. She agreed and I soon had the Wells Fargo bank account number, routing number, and swift code for one Olatunji Moses Mark.
After this I announced to Supper Books that I was investigating their site and had uncovered evidence of it being a scam. In response, the person claiming to be Melissa Speier doubled down, stating that “Olatunji Moses Mark is one of our community coordinator who works closely with our community manager to organize reads and support both readers and authors.”
It’s likely that Olatunji Moses Mark is the same person behind the Suppermark username, who posted the first comment on the Supper Book readers Discord. That Discord profile linked to the X-Twitter account @mosesmark08, which itself linked to a promotional site for a Moses Mark. This website claims to “boost your book” and “Elevate Your Book’s Reach with Proven Marketing Strategies” and was created and hosted through VZY, a service allowing people to use AI to create website content, images, and forms.
Speier also offered to share with me “direct gmail contacts of a few authors who’ve worked with us, so you can reach out, ask your own questions, and confirm our process firsthand.”
Naturally I said sure, send me these author endorsements. I was sent the names of three authors along with three suspicious gmail addresses, each having the author’s name and the words “novelist” or “author” in the gmail address. For example, one of the authors Supper Books claimed would validate their claims was Elena Ferrante, a pseudonymous Italian author translated into many languages. The gmail I was given for Ferrante was elenaferrantenovelist@gmail.com.
Before I emailed this famously reclusive author, I contacted Europa Editions, a major publisher of Elena Ferrante’s books. Daniela Petracco with Europa Editions confirmed that this was indeed a fake email address and that neither Ferrante or any of her representatives have ever been in touch with or vouched for “the Supper Club, or any other book club whether authentic or fake.”
Once that email was proven fake, I emailed the fake Ferrante’s gmail and, surprise surprise, heard back. The fake Ferrante praised my writings and tried to convince me the Supper Book service was valid, adding that she had used it herself. The email closed by saying, “Sometimes what looks uncertain from the outside can still be useful for authors, depending on how it is approached.”
The AI Is Strong in This One
Artificial intelligence circles every level of this scam like water down the toilet.
As Neil Clarke said recently on the Worldcon “Navigating AI as an Author or Editor” panel, he isn’t worried about publishing AI – he’s instead worried about how generative AI has enabled scammers and made it harder for real writers to submit and publish their works.
One reason many authors are not falling for this book club scam at this time is that something still seems off. The AI generated words and images don’t feel right. I believe that’s why the scam has evolved to now invite authors into these Discord communities – it’s an attempt to convince skeptical authors. To show them that these 2,000 member communities of book lovers exist and are eager to embrace and promote great books.
As I mentioned earlier, I can’t prove whether the people behind these scams are personally running multiple email and Discord accounts and using generative AI to populate the content, or if they’re instead using AI chatbots to write and send the emails and Discord comments. Either option is possible.
But either way, I definitely believe we are witnessing the development of a new type of scam. As generative AI becomes easier to use at ever lower costs, scammers will be able to populate entire online communities with AI chatbots.
Those 2,000 readers the book club scams mention? With AI chatbots and tools, scammers will soon be able to create fake Discord communities like that. It was relatively easy for me to investigate the Supper Books readers Discord because it had so few users. But when there are 2,000 chatbot enabled users? Even if the chatbots make mistakes, that will look more like a true community.
And that will in turn make it far easier for writers to be scammed.
While I was working on this report I received an email from someone named Maribel Perry, who praised We Who Hunt Alexanders and offered a similar scam to get my book out of what she called “Amazon exile.” I replied with interest and was promptly told of yet another Discord community to check out.
Then just over two hours later, a third scammer contacted me, this time about a different book of mine.
In the second email Melissa W. Speier sent me, she quoted Stephen King famous words that “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
Sadly, those words also apply to scammers. Especially when they have access to artificial intelligence.