Scamalot

I'm too trusting sometimes.

I think it comes from the fact that I try my hardest to treat people kindly and fairly, so I make the mistaken assumption that most other people act the same way.  This is a strategy that works well until it doesn't.  Because while there are lots of good people out there, there are a significant number who simply aren't.

The subset of these malefactors I run into the most often are scammers.  Being a struggling author, I get daily emails from people who are trying to take my two-digit monthly royalty statement and convert it into a one-digit monthly royalty statement via fake offers for promotion and marketing.  The whole enterprise is evil -- preying on the hopes and dreams of a hard-working creative to enrich their own bank accounts while giving nothing of value in return.

Simply put, these people are parasites.  The tapeworms of the publishing industry.

I generally just delete emails from scammers, but I have to admit that my friend, the awesome writer Andrew Butters, has an inspired approach:

Scammer:  Hello Mr. Author Andrew Butters.

Andrew: No.

So it's fortunate that a great many of them aren't all that good at it.  The majority of the scam promotion emails I get have a slick, glib feel that my wife thinks (and I agree) comes from having fed my Amazon book blurbs into an AI program, but this hasn't stopped them from sometimes accidentally blundering and giving away the game.  I got not one, but two emails targeting my novel Lock & Key that started out exactly the same way:

Darren Ault shoots a bullet, humanity vanishes, and suddenly Vikings, cults, and a foul-mouthed librarian of timelines are all part of the mix—Lock & Key reads like a full-blown temporal rollercoaster.  Yet your reviews are far fewer than the epic adventures inside.  Your mix of humor, mind-bending time travel, and irreverent sci-fi is exactly the type of story that clicks with this group.  Want to see what happens when 2,000+ readers dive in and leave verified reviews that could boost your book across the sci-fi/fantasy world?

Never mind that on page one, we find out that Darren was the victim, not the shooter, and the entire fucking story is working out why he wasn't killed when he was shot point-blank in the head.

I also had one regarding my novella Convection that read like a book report written by someone who hadn't actually read the book, but is a real master at using florid language:

I just reviewed Convection, and it’s an atmospheric, slow-burn survival thriller that delivers on multiple fronts, natural disaster suspense, psychological tension, and a creeping sense of dread.  The Bayou Vista Apartments setting is brilliantly claustrophobic: a handful of strangers trapped together while a Category 5 hurricane pounds the Louisiana coast, each bringing their own secrets to the storm.  Your pacing turns the hurricane into both a physical and emotional pressure cooker, while the ensemble cast dynamics keep the tension sharp and unpredictable.

Well, thank you for all that, but once again, there's nothing there you couldn't have learned from the book blurb.  At least, unlike the Lock & Key scams, you didn't miss the whole damn point of the story.

I do get a laugh out of the ones who can't even make the scam sound authentic.  I have had emails start out "Hello Bonnet," which strikes me as a little abrupt if you're trying to hook me in to giving you money.  I had another tell me how much they'd enjoyed my book If Only You Knew, which isn't even close to any of my book titles.  And just last week I had one that began, I shit you not, "Hello Anastasia."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Scam by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images]

But none of these came as close to catching me flat-footed as the exchange I recently had with someone who claimed to be the award-winning author Ottessa Moshfegh, which started out with a nice (and not at all fulsome or overdone) comment about how she'd seen my Facebook author page and thought my books sounded interesting.

To my own credit, my first thought was to wonder why an author of Ottessa Moshfegh's stature would be hanging around on the Facebook author page of a relative unknown like myself, but... well, the algorithm is weird, and I do often see pages for people I've never heard of.  And the other peculiar thing is that I don't promote my books much on Facebook (hell, I don't promote my books much period, but that's another matter).  But there was something about her initial email that was so low-key and casual that it took me off my guard.

So we had an email exchange that was courteous and friendly, asking about stuff like what my inspirations were and which of my books would be the best to start with.  I asked her the same thing, and got thoughtful responses that sounded entirely authentic.

Then, in an informal, almost offhand way, she asked me how I was doing with marketing.  That was the point I definitely got that old by-the-pricking-of-my-thumbs feeling.  I responded that it was the part of the job I hated the most, because I kind of suck at self-promotion.  She came back with a heartfelt, "We all feel that way!"... but she knew a good publicist, and if I was interested she could put us in touch.

Aha.  There it is.

Fortunately, the real Ottessa Moshfegh has a Substack with "contact me" information (linked above), so I decided to do a little reality check.  I sent her an email saying that I'd had a nice exchange with someone who claimed to be her, and if it really was her then cool beans, but if not I thought she should know she had an impersonator.  A day later, she wrote back.

It was not her.  And she was pissed.

Not at me, of course.  In fact, she apologized to me (not that it was in any way her fault), and thanked me for letting her know.  The real Ottessa seems like a class act, and it double sucks that a scammer would impersonate her, and use her name, reputation, and cachet to try to bilk a starving (well, figuratively speaking, anyhow) author like myself.

The upshot is that Pseudottessa buggered off and I haven't heard from her since.  But if she happens to be reading this, here's a message from me and from real Ottessa:

Go to hell.

So I may be trusting, but I'm learning.  I might get fooled for a little while, but it's never long enough that I'm even tempted to give them money.  Part of this is that I'm a world-class skinflint, but it's also that I've had enough experience with people in the publishing world who make extravagant promises and then deliver fuck-all that I've gotten wary.

I'm still generally an optimist about people; I think on the whole it's better than being a cynic.  My dad used to say "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right," and I think that's spot-on.  But it's also made me hate scammers even more, because they take advantage of people's naïveté and trust, and that's just an ugly thing to do.

So be on the lookout for these guys.  Especially with the help of AI, they're getting pretty fancy about it, and it's easy to see how the unwary might be taken in.  Not all of them are as stupid as the guy who thought my name was Anastasia.  And mark my words, as we get better at recognizing them, they'll find other, better tricks to pull.

Evolution in the Kingdom of Scamalot.  Which is kind of a scary thought.

****************************************

Statue of limitations

There are days that I really don't understand the human species at all.

Yes, I know I'm one of 'em.  But still.  People can be weird in ways that I find utterly baffling, and this has at times made me wonder if I'm an alien changeling or something.

The latest example of Stupid Human Tricks is courtesy of a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link with a message that basically said, "You gotta see this."  But before I tell you about the article he sent me, I need to tell you about Harold von Braunhut.

Harold von Braunhut was, to put it mildly, an entrepreneur, and reached the peak of his productivity back in the 1970s and 1980s.  His most famous invention/scam was "Sea Monkeys," which -- if you're around my age -- will be immediately familiar, because advertisements for them were everywhere.  Here's von Braunhut's ad:

Tens of thousands of kids sent in their hard-earned dollars, and were dismayed to find that what they were sent were...

... brine shrimp.

For comparison purposes, here is a photograph of actual brine shrimp:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons michelle jo, Many live brine shrimp, CC BY 3.0]

The first thing you undoubtedly noticed about them is that they look absolutely nothing like the illustration in the advertisement.  They don't have little crowns or human-like faces, they don't have long, shapely legs, and the females (whichever those are?) aren't wearing lipstick.  Plus, if you've ever dealt with brine shrimp -- often used as food animals for saltwater aquariums -- you know that they are not "instant pets... a bowl full of happiness... so eager to please they can even be trained."

But why von Braunhut's name comes up is because of another of his inventions -- if I can dignify them by that term -- the "Invisible Goldfish."  You sent him your money, and he sent you back a cheap plastic goldfish bowl, some fish food, and a handbook.  Add water, and voilà... instant invisible goldfish.  It came along with a guarantee that the fish was indeed invisible -- your money back if you ever saw him.

Now, before you start snickering at how gullible people were back then, consider the fact that just a couple of weeks ago, an Italian artist -- and I am using that word as guardedly as I did calling von Braunhut's scams "inventions" -- named Salvatore Garau just sold a "sculpture" for a cool $18,300, which is even more amazing because the sculpture doesn't exist.

The title of the, um, big blob of nothing is Io Sono, which is Italian for "I Am."  Kind of ironic, because "It Isn't."  Just like with von Braunhut's invisible goldfish, Garau's sculpture comes along with guidelines to set it up -- it must be, he says, in a five-foot-by-five-foot space, free of obstructions.

Oh, and it comes with a certificate of authenticity.  Because you wouldn't want to set up any inauthentic nothing in your house.  Just think how the neighbors would laugh.

Like von Braunhut, who was completely unapologetic about how well his business did, Garau is ridiculously serious about the whole thing, as befits a True Artiste.  And like many True Artistes, he is really good at slinging the arcane, pseudo-profound bullshit.  "The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight," he said, in an interview with the Spanish news outlet Diario AS.  "Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us...  When I decide to ‘exhibit’ an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms."

In fact, that is not even close to what the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says.  Insofar as what Garau said has any meaning at all, he seems to be talking about vacuum energy and virtual particle pair production.  But neither of those has a damn thing to do with invisible statues, and I can nearly guarantee that Garau doesn't much understand these, either.

Most astonishing of all is that this is not the second, but the third time Garau has done this.  He has two other nonexistent sculptures, Buddha in Contemplation and Afrodite Cries.  The first is displayed (so to speak) in the Piazza della Scala in Milan, and the other in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

The latter, by the way, was supported and paid for by the Italian Cultural Institute.

You know, it's not that I don't understand Garau, or, for that matter, von Braunhut.  Once you figure out that you can sell non-existent statues and/or fish, the financial incentive has got to be pretty powerful.  The people I don't understand are the buyers.  Not only did someone buy Garau's non-statue, there was a bidding war that drove it to twice the original asking price.  I shit you not.

That, my friends, is some expensive nothing.

You know, I really think I'm missing the boat, here, working my ass off writing novels.  What I should be doing is selling front and back covers.  On the front cover would be some kind of impressive-sounding name, like The Cosmic Spirit Speaks.  Then on the back, I could have the following:

The ultimate goal of the novelist's voice is to spark the imagination, to create a new world in the mind of the reader.  When we hear that voice, it melds with our being to generate a truly fresh creation, something that did not exist before.  In The Cosmic Spirit Speaks, Bonnet has driven this generative capacity of the author-reader link to its utmost -- a story that is the product of the reader's spirit listening to the still voice of the universe, without needing the intermediary of a plot trying to force that spirit along a particular path.  The reader truly becomes the wellspring of creation.

Which is a fancy way of saying, "You wanna story?  Go write your own fucking story.  Just send me money."

Nah, probably wouldn't work.  I wouldn't last through the first television "meet the author' interview without cracking up.  And you can't sell nonexistent books, statues, or goldfish if you don't take the whole thing -- and yourself -- way too seriously.

***************************************

I'm in awe of people who are true masters of their craft.  My son is a professional glassblower, making precision scientific equipment, and watching him do what he does has always seemed to me to be a little like watching a magic show.  On a (much) lower level of skill, I'm an amateur potter, and have a great time exploring different kinds of clays, pigments, stains, and glazes used in making functional pottery.

What amazes me, though, is that crafts like these aren't new.  Glassblowing, pottery-making, blacksmithing, and other such endeavors date back to long before we knew anything about the underlying chemistry and physics; the techniques were developed by a long history of trial and error.

This is the subject of Anna Ploszajski's new book Handmade: A Scientist's Search for Meaning Through Making, in which she visits some of the finest craftspeople in the world -- and looks at what each is doing through the lenses of history and science.  It's a fascinating inquiry into the drive to create, and how we've learned to manipulate the materials around us into tools, technology, and fine art.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Scam detection

I am asked sometimes why I care so much if people believe counterfactual nonsense.  "What's the harm?" is a frequent way the question is phrased.  "So what if folks like to check their horoscope or get a Tarot card reading every so often?  Who is it hurting?"

There are two answers to this.  First, once you've accepted one idea without requiring that it have any connection to reality, it makes it all too easy to get suckered again.  One gets in a habit of sloppy thinking -- or not thinking at all -- and the attractiveness of certain forms of woo are such that once you've started down that road, it's hard to turn back.

The second, though, is more insidious, and it is that it puts you at risk of being taken advantage of by predatory charlatans.  These are people who know damn good and well that they are liars, but are shamelessly bilking people for thousands of dollars, preying on gullibility, desperation, and grief to swell their own ill-gotten gains.

Take, for example, "psychic detectives."  These people descend like vultures on families whose loved ones have gone missing, claiming that they will gather information from The Cosmos to tell the grief-stricken whether the missing individual is dead or alive, whether there's any hope of their safe return, or (if they're dead) where the body might be found.  One session can cost $500 or more.  And driven by the loss and emptiness, together with the horrible uncertainty regarding what happened, the victims are often willing to pay.  The result?  "Psychic detectives" do a thriving business.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So it does my heart good to see one of them get found out.  Just last week, Inside Edition reporter Lisa Guerrero did an exposé on Portland, Oregon "psychic detective" Laurie McQuary, wherein the show's producer, Charlie McLravy, hired McQuary, posing as the brother of a missing girl.  He brought along a photograph and asked McQuary what had happened to the girl.

McQuary didn't hesitate.  The girl was dead, she said.  She hated to tell him that, but she had to be honest.  Her death was violent, and involved sexual assault.  In the end, her assailant hit her in the head with a rock and killed her.

But it went further than that.  McQuary brought out a map, and told McLravy where he could find his sister's body.  "She's right here," she said.  "No more than a mile or two away."

The next day, McQuary was brought in to be interviewed by Guerrero.  Guerrero brought out the photograph, and McQuary verified that she'd spoken to the missing girl's brother, and that the girl was dead.

"You always know... if a person is dead or alive?" Guerrero asked.

"Oh, yes," McQuary answered.

"Then would you be surprised to know that this little girl is me?"

There was a moment of pure shocked silence.  Then McQuary said, her voice faltering a little, "And... um... you haven't been abducted?"

Guerrero said, "No, as you can see, I'm right here.  Can you explain this?"

McQuary said, "No, I can't."

Then Guerrero went in for the kill.  "This little girl is me, and you told him she was dead.  You're taking advantage of desperate people with a bunch of hocus-pocus, aren't you?"

McQuary said, "No, I'm not," and then got up and walked off the sound stage, trying to gather whatever shreds were left of her dignity, ending with, "This has been very interesting.  You all have a very nice day."

All in all, McLravy and Guerrero showed the photograph to ten psychic detectives -- all of whom said that Guerrero had died as a child.  Not a single one said, "Um... she's still alive, she was never abducted, and in fact, she isn't your sister.  What's going on here?"

It's not that I don't understand the pain people feel over loss.  And although I've never had a close friend or relative disappear, I can imagine how hard it is not to know the fate of someone you care about.  So I have some sympathy for the grieving family members who hire these people.

But the idea that "psychic detectives" and other such charlatans are using the pain of the grieving to bilk them out of huge sums of cash, and giving them nothing in return but a skein of lies -- that is unforgivable.  And to Guerrero and McLravy, all I can say is: touché.

Prayer for pay

One of the inevitable downsides of a blog such as this one is that I tend to focus on negative stuff.  People who believe (and peddle) nonsense, charlatans, hoaxers, dupers, swindlers, and thieves.  And the world being what it is, a sizable percentage of the aforementioned no-goods never get caught, never get stopped, never have to recompense their victims what they've stolen.

Today I'm going to look at a case where the good guys won.  The story, which was sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, starts out like so many of the others -- but then ends on a happy note.

The scam was the brainchild of one Benjamin Rogovy of Seattle.  It was a website called "Christian Prayer Center," where you could sign up to have prayers said for you (or for a friend or loved one) -- as long as you donated.

All major credit cards accepted, of course.

More insidious still was that if you signed up and gave Rogovy your credit card information, you were put on a list for "continued prayers," and billed monthly -- unless you specifically clicked "No, Thank You."  And as you may have experienced with other such auto-bill sites, once you were on the monthly billing list, getting off of it wasn't easy.

Complaints began to roll in, some coming from as far away as Singapore.  Unfortunately, there was little the authorities could do.  Because the Christian Prayer Center was a licensed business, and it's hard to see how you could claim that you hadn't gotten what you'd paid for (no one said your prayers were going to be answered, after all), Rogovy was making money hand over fist from people who were either desperate or gullible or both.

Finally, however, Rogovy stepped over the line by including fake testimonials and made-up religious leaders as a way of increasing his take.  And it worked, for a while; records show that he raked in $7.75 million from over 165,000 people over a period of three years.  Hard as that is to believe.  But once the false information started showing up, that gave Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson leverage to go after the sly bastard.

And he succeeded.  Last week, as part of a settlement, Rogovy agreed to return millions of dollars to the people he'd bilked.  "What I will not tolerate," Ferguson said in a statement, "is unlawful businesses that prey upon people —taking advantage of their faith or their need for help— in order to make a quick buck."  A Facebook page appeared called "Christian Prayer Center SCAM" warning people away from the site.

People seeking a refund for money they've sent to the Christian Prayer Center and its sister site, Orcion Cristiana, have until June 12, 2016 to file a claim with the Attorney General's office.

The one cloud behind all of this golden lining is that people like Rogovy rarely ever go away.  As we saw this week with Peter Popoff, the lure of relieving the faithful of their filthy lucre is simply too tempting.  Until the Attorney General's office mandated that it be shut down, the Christian Prayer Center's website had a sanctimonious message stating, "We thank you for all the prayers, and we cherish the opportunity to have created a place where Christians could meet to support each other."  As of the writing of this post, the Center's Facebook page was still up, with a pinned post at the top of the feed saying, "If the Christian Prayer Center adds value to your lives and you think online prayer is important, please type "Yes" or "Amen" to our wall!  We love to hear praise reports and testimonials," and the following image:

Because apparently the answer to "What Would Jesus Do?" is "use false claims to take money from people and claim he's praying for them, but actually doing nothing."

So it's to be hoped that the judgment against Rogovy will put a stop to the money pouring into the Christian Prayer Center.  The problem is, of course, that even if this puts Rogovy out of business, there's always another swindler waiting in line.

If there's a sucker born every minute, as P. T. Barnum observed, there are probably two thieves born in the same amount of time.