In a Guardian essay, the novelist describes near-daily, AI-polished fan emails that offer to promote his books for a fee, and how playing along ended with a postal address in the Philippines.
Novelist Joe Dunthorne wrote in the Guardian on 1 November that he receives AI-written "fan mail" almost every day, from supposed readers in cities such as Barcelona, Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw who sign themselves with names like Bella Monroe or Thalina Rose. The multi-paragraph messages praise his novels and nonfiction in detail, he says, but promise to promote his work to book clubs only if he transfers a few hundred dollars to cover costs. He reports that other writers receive the same kind of message, and that some scammers impersonate famous authors: one email purporting to be from Ottessa Moshfegh discussed her work-in-progress and then pointed him to her Amazon page.
Dunthorne says he played along with a self-described founder of a "Berlin Book Club", insisting that he could only pay in cash by post, until she supplied a postal address in the Philippines. He links such messages to the organised "scam farms" of south-east Asia, where, in his account, trafficked workers are forced to run frauds, including long-running romance and investment cons, with the help of generative AI and face-masking apps. He cites the raid on a compound in Bamban, which he says was found to be run by the local mayor, Alice Guo. These descriptions come from the author's essay, and Reporix has not independently verified each detail.
The essay also notes the copyright backdrop: Dunthorne writes that Anthropic agreed last year to pay $1.5bn to authors whose books were used to train its Claude model, and that a group of publishers sued Google in July over the training of Gemini. He did not send any money and instead passed the details to the Philippine cybercrime agency, adding that the standard advice for writers is simply to report the email, block the sender and move on. His conclusion is that behind the upbeat, personalised messages there may be someone working under duress rather than a fan, and that authors approached by unknown "promoters" asking for upfront fees should treat the offer with caution.
