Ding, ding, ding. We have an AI scammer!

The number of scams is on the rise. Systems like ChatGPT have made it super-easy for the charlatans to craft the perfect emails.

Scrape this website here of that information. Scrape that bit too. Oh, and get ChatGPT to run its own high-powered search. And tell the system to craft the perfect email that will suck the unsuspecting doop in.

As many of us start to see more and more of these emails, we’re starting to see patterns that seem to be the Hallmark of scams. But, it’s getting harder and harder to spot the scams. And for a freelance editor (and writing coach) such as myself, what might look like a scam on the first inspection (as it’s an email that follows the telltale signs of an AI scam), the email might indeed be a prospective client that I need to start courting.

In today’s post, we’re going to look at the tactics that scammers are now using. I’ll even attempt to provide tips on how to identify the AI scams for what they are (though the AI scammers are quickly evolving and they are wisening up to their own failings.)

I’m no stranger to scams

Anyone who has been paying attention to my blog posts (or are familiar with my book Hidden Traps of the Internet) will know that I’m no stranger to scams. I’ve encountered so many of them over the years, including phone (voice) scams, login scams, text scams, and the social media DM scams.

I have an insane number of scams finding my inbox, and all of them are coming in via public-facing emails. These are emails that are listed on my website, so they are visible to the scraper bots. And when I get emails in duplicate…

Yep, you read that correctly. With the current influx of emails, I’m getting scam emails in duplicate, sometimes triplicate. There are a few emails listed on my website, and the scammers have taken to using them all. (Those duplicate emails make it super-easy to just delete.)

But it’s the current avenue that irritates me. Some scammers have taken to using my contact form.

I have honeypot filters and CAPTCHA fields on my contact forms. And I’ve taken to using things that a human needs to actually interact with (entering specific data that bots can’t see to get past the checks). And it hasn’t stopped the scammers. Instead, they copy-and-paste their AI-generated text into the message box, fill in the human checks, and hit send. And their message gets past my spam filters and looks like a prospective client.

I’m still able to spot most of these emails as a scam right away because they are often filled with bloated praise that is disgustingly sweet. But occasionally…

It’s just hard to tell.

Praise for a book yet to be released

During the last week of November 2025, I received the following message via my contact form on my website.

Hi Judy,

I hope you’re doing well. I came across Antagonistic Beats of a Story and was really drawn to the idea of focusing on the antagonist’s role in shaping the whole narrative. Your approach to exploring antagonist-driven beats and the deeper interplay between protagonist and antagonist truly stands out. I haven’t read the full book yet, but the description alone shows how much clarity and experience you bring as a story coach. I’d love to stay connected and follow more of your work your perspective on structure is refreshing, especially for writers trying to strengthen the middle of their stories.

Looking forward to learning more from you.

The spidey senses went off almost right away.

Let’s start by the fact that the sender email that I’m able to “respond” to is a Gmail address. The use of the Gmail address does not mean that it was a scam—many writers contact me via Gmail—but majority of the scams that I get these days (and I’m receiving in the order of 100 per week on a good week) come from Gmail addresses.

I tried to hold the spidey senses at bay to give this email the benefit of doubt. There was still the possibility that this was a prospective client. But there was one line in that email that didn’t sit right with me.

“I haven’t read the full book yet, but the description alone shows how much clarity and experience you bring as a story coach.”

At the time I received that email, the advance reader copies had yet to be released. (Ironically, they were released the next day.)

So, of course, the sender hadn’t read the full book yet. How could they?

At that time, only four people would have seen the full manuscript, other than myself: the three people who volunteered to be my beta readers, and the copyeditor for the project. Not even my husband had seen it.

But, instead of just deleting the email to what I knew was likely a scam, I decided to turn the tables and responded with a message that took them off script.

Hi [redacted],

Thank you for your kind words. Antagonistic Beats of a Story will be released to the public on February 10, 2026. It is currently available for preorder from a variety of retailers.

In the meantime, I’d like to invite you to subscribe to my newsletter filled with writing and editing tips. You can subscribe at: https://storycoach.judylmohr.com/subscribe/

In the meantime, keep writing.

Judy L Mohr

Thirty minutes later, I received the response that rang the AI-scammer bell. (What is presented below is the exact email. See if you can hear that AI-scammer bell going too.)

Thank you so much for the update  and congratulations on the upcoming release of Antagonistic Beats of a Story! February 2026 is already looking exciting. I’m glad to hear it’s available for pre-order across multiple retailers. I appreciate you sharing your newsletter as well. I’ve subscribed to your writing and editing insights will definitely be valuable, and I’m looking forward to learning from them.

Also, as your release date gets closer, I’d be happy to share a few simple pre-launch ideas that can help boost early visibility and build momentum for the book   things like teaser visuals, pre-order highlights, and strategic early-reader engagement. If you’re open to it, I’d love to support your launch in any way I can.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Wishing you continued success as the release date approaches!

Telltale AI Flaws

The messages quoted above were as they came in. My theme for my website unfortunately adds italics to the block quotes, but imagine that they were all normal fonts. And let’s break this down into where the AI script couldn’t cope.

Reintroduction of Poor English

Back in the days before ChatGPT, you could easily spot the scams because they would be written in broken English, often with sentences that didn’t make sense. Sometimes, they would be SHOUTING AT YOU, as the emails were in all caps. Or there wouldn’t be any punctuation at all, which was another sign of a scam.

But I do need to highlight that I’ve received legit emails from prospective clients that were in broken English (often text-message type language), using all caps or no punctuation at all. So…

Well, with the increasing use of ChatGPT, the scammers are now able to get past the grammar scans—which is why the initial email is so well written (ignoring their fubar about reading the book). But this is also why you need to throw them off script if you decide to respond.

Changes to Formatting (or Poor Formatting)

In their response to me, the formatting of my book title had changed. Unfortunately, my theme doesn't highlight those changed. But in the initial email, the title was in roman. In the reply to my email, it was in italics, which matches what I sent them. It matches what I sent them.

There were also added spaces in the system (which my theme takes out be default). The added spaces is a sign that they’ve copied and pasted into a template. But the most damning is the last sentence in the first paragraph, which is a reintroduction of poor English that the AI system clearly couldn’t compensate for.

“I’ve subscribed to your writing and editing insights will definitely be valuable…”

(You don’t want to know how many times I had to reread that line just to mentally process it.)

The Pitch of Services

It’s that second paragraph in their response that is the real sign that we’re dealing with a scam. It’s pitching services that I didn’t ask for.

Had I asked for information about services, then we would have been dealing with a different situation, but I didn’t. In my response to their initial email, I politely corrected them about how the book in question wasn’t out yet and invited them to sign up to my newsletter. Nowhere did I ask for them to pitch me services.

And it’s when the pitching starts that you can almost guarantee that you’re dealing with a scammer.

At that point, I just flagged the email as spam and moved the entire conversation to my spam folder. (No, I didn’t immediately delete it, because I wanted the spam filter to learn from the email, so it can identify the spam in future.)

The Icing on the Cake

There is some irony in this situation.

When I next logged into my email management system to write my next newsletter, I noticed that the scammer’s email address had been added to my newsletter list. They actually subscribed.

And their location… (Oh, you’ll love this…) According to their IP address and location information, they are in Nigeria.

The Nigerian Prince

Nigeria seems to be a breeding ground for scams, and this has been the case for years.

Long ago, the scams that affectionately had been dubbed as the Nigerian Prince contained pleading words from the “prince” himself, needing to ship money offshore to… well… I want to say launder it, but that’s not really what the emails said. It was things like they wanted to give you money for no reason at all.

They wanted your bank account information so they could supposedly send you money. But as soon as they had that information, your accounts were cleaned out.

Banking systems within New Zealand don’t allow for this kind of thing (and have not done so for many years). There are multiple tiers to the checks for withdrawals, so the old-style Nigerian Prince scams never really hit New Zealand shores. But with the introduction of internet-based money transfers, things changed dramatically… and so too did the nature of the Nigerian Prince scams.

The Nigerian Prince scams quickly morphed to selling services via sites like Fiverr or Upwork, delivering substandard work or not delivering at all. The pitches often contained boastful claims that promised fame and glory for the unsuspecting victim. And if you were to trace the origins of the accounts on Fiverr, 9 times out of 10, it would be linked to someone in Nigeria.

In recent times, the Nigerian Prince scams have morphed into book marketing, book publication, and book clubs.

I won’t go into full detail here, but I highly recommend reading the blogs on Writer Beware regarding the Nigerian Prince scams. There are a few of them there, all containing screenshots of the emails and the crazy responses that come in. And the articles date back to 2011 (that’s how old this scam is). But Victoria Strauss (the brains behind Writer Beware) is also tracking how ChatGPT has altered the scam, and how it’s become more dangerous.

To give you an idea, the scammers now have elaborate websites and Discord communities, all designed to doop a person into believing that the services being offered are real… but they aren’t.

How to Protect Yourself

There are multiple steps involved in protecting yourself. The first is to be skeptical of all emails coming in. Unless you recognize and trust the source, don’t take anything on face value… especially if the communication is laced with sugary-sweet flattery.

The next important step is to turn on your spam filter within your email editing program of choice. Most email servers will have SpamAssassin built into their systems (or something like it), but SpamAssassin can only do so much. Your chosen email editor will have a separate spam filter that needs to be trained. Use it!

As the spam comes in, flag it as such, move it to your spam folder, then forget about it.

Don’t respond. Don’t click any links (even unsubscribe links). Just mark it as spam and delete!

Yes, the spam filters will occasionally flag an email as spam that isn’t spam, which is why I don’t have my system immediately delete emails that it thinks is spam. But false positives are part of the system training. You just tell the system that a particular email wasn’t spam, and more often than not, it’s moved into your inbox.

As a quick guide, here is a list of things that instantly get flagged as spam in my system.

No Subject Line

It doesn’t matter where the email came from. If there is no subject line, then I don’t open it.

FYI, even my contact forms add a subject line to emails, so those suspect emails with no subject line aren’t coming into my system via that avenue.

Subject Line that Hints at Pitching

The following is a list of subject lines found in my spam folder (including the odd punctuation).

• how readers are finding books like yours
• How Authors Are Using YouTube to Attract More Readers
• Hello [insert name], Ready to reach real readers??
• Book Promotion
• Invitation to Contribute to a Medium Blog Series
• Turning your work into a consistent monthly income stream!
• I noticed something about your book
• Re ; Urgently Please
• Transform Your eBook Promotion with Cinematic 3D Animation
• your story gave me an idea
• Don’t Let Your Book Go Unnoticed
• Re ; Urgently Help
• Mutual Loan

Those are all subject lines from emails that were flagged as spam within my system during the last week (and my spam folder is cleaned out every week automatically). Are you seeing the trends? And quite a few of these are in duplicate. And I always laugh when I see “Hello blog” in the list, like the bots decided that “blog” was my name because of the blog@ email address that they sent it to.

Suspect Names Associated with the Email

Sometimes, you can tell from the name connected to the email that it’s a scam (and an unwanted pitch). And sometimes, the names are just not all that original… or hilariously flawed.

• Haftaldigital
• KellyOliverBooks
• Janet Crown Media
• author Catalyst
• Emily Austin (using [redacted]fiverr[redacted]@gmail.com)
• ECOM Ridwan
• Honor Reverion
• EMMANUEL ADS SERVICE
• King
• SIR , BARRISTER JOHNSON
• Barrister Luther

And I just can’t stop laughing at that last one. I mean, I know that some lawyers are called the devil, but… (I know it’s not Lucifer, but close enough for my brain.)

And I should also point out that all of those names were associated with Gmail addresses, i.e., @gmail.com

I also had emails that came from custom domain email addresses, so don’t think that this is exclusively a Gmail issue.

As an extension to the silly names (and obvious marketing names), you have the names that are suspect because they either don’t reflect the name within the email or they are of an ethnic origin that is known for scams, i.e., Chinese, Korean, African, Middle Eastern, Indian. I have to admit that I don’t like making that last statement (assuming that anyone from those areas of the world might be scammers), but this is the reality of the internet world. When you couple those names of ethnic origin with the suspect subject line, one has to assume that we’re dealing with a scammer.

No Text in the Body of the Email

It sounds odd, but yep, I also get spam emails that have a simple subject line but no text in the body of the email. Not even a signature line.

I will grant you that my email editor sometimes refuses to show the content of a message (this is often the case with emails that come from my pole dancing studio), but if I hit the reply button, I can normally see the hidden messages.

But when nothing can be found…

I can’t even fathom why anyone would want to send blank emails.

The Quantity Sent Within a Short Time

Then we can spot the scams by the persistence of the scammers. They will send multiple emails within a short period (and I’m not just talking about the duplication that I seem to get).

Emily Austin (whose email address suggests that they operate through Fiverr) has sent me six emails in the last week (most with no subject line). KellyOliverBooks has sent me 10. NADYA ALBERT has sent 4, all with a simple subject line (Hello) and no content in the main body of the message. And Hannah jales sent me 56 emails within a span of 20 minutes. (My jaw dropped when I saw how many of them there were. And I instantly went into the backend of my system and blacklisted that email. No way I was letting those through. (FYI, that email was a @gmail.com email, so I couldn't blacklist the domain, though I wish I could.))

I will never understand the logic of this bombardment, except to be annoying.

Not Sure It’s a Scam?

Even if you are diligent, there will be times when you don’t know if you are dealing with a scammer or not. Just look back at the emails that I referenced at the start of this post. I had a feeling it was a scammer, but I couldn’t be 100% sure. So, my response was carefully constructed to take the bot off script.

The scammers using these systems will have a stack of AI-generated responses that they will use based on what you respond with. It will be a simple exercise that plugs your response in and generates a canned response back that still feels natural.

But if you respond with something that they have likely never seen before, then they will need to ask ChatGPT to create a new dedicated response that won’t be as tidy as the canned responses. It will have the reintroduction of broken English, or the poor formatting, or take your pick. And continued responses that constantly take them off script will eventually see the total breakdown of communication.

If you work with enough of these responses (via email or DMs on social media), you’ll start to see the patterns and will be able to expose the scam within a few short messages. The communication from the start of this blog post took only one response from me to expose the scam.

And the moment that scam alarm goes off…

Delete. Do not respond. Don’t click any links (including unsubscribe links). Just flag them as spam and move them out of your inbox. It’s that simple.

My Final Thoughts

As AI-generative technologies become more sophisticated, so too will the scams. It saddens me to know that trust has now disappeared because of how the technology is being abused. It’s not the technology that’s at fault here—just how people are using it. But there will always be someone willing to exploit the system and take advantage of people’s good nature.

Please take whatever steps you feel are needed to protect yourself from these kinds of scams.

Then we can laugh at the antics of these idiots.