Fake book clubs impersonate real organizers to bill authors
Author Snigdha Poonam traced one invitation to a scam using a real Seattle group's name and a real LA improv organizer's name on the same email thread
Writer Snigdha Poonam received an email addressed to "Professor Snigdha Poonam" from someone identifying as Timothy Firth, organizer of a Seattle-based life-drawing community called CAM Life Drawing with 1,943 members. The email said the group wanted to discuss her book Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World at an upcoming meetup, with attendees encouraged to post reviews on Goodreads and Amazon afterward. Poonam found CAM Life Drawing's real events page and Instagram account, which showed photos of a white, male Timothy Firth — and suspected the person emailing her was not him.
A follow-up email included a promotional poster and a request for an unspecified "contribution fee" to cover promotion, coordination and administration. That email was signed by "Stephen, Organizer, Community Improv LA," a different real group in a different city, still sent from Timothy's email address. The email also contained what Poonam described as a leftover AI prompt reading "MAKE IT MORE PROFESSIONAL."
Poonam agreed to pay after the event rather than before and joined a Google Meet with roughly 20 attendees, none with cameras on, using names including Timothy, Stephen, Alexander, Andrew, Mira and Rajnish. Questions asked of her sounded AI-generated. Despite profile pictures appearing to show white men and women, every voice on the call spoke with a West African accent, according to Poonam's account. Novelist Marsh Rose separately described a similar experience with a "Chicago LGBTQ Book Club" in a post for WritersWeekly.com, writing that the voices she heard "all sounded like my friend in Nigeria."
Here's the part that should keep you up at night: these scammers aren't inventing fake personas from scratch, they're hijacking real community organizers' names and identities to look legitimate. Poonam only caught it because she's spent ten years reporting on fraud networks. Most authors won't have that radar, and the invitation will look exactly as polished as a real one — blurbs, Zoom links, a seemingly engaged audience asking smart questions. My take: the second anyone linked to a "book club" asks for a contribution fee, payment is the only verification that matters, and it should come after the event, never before, if at all.
From the Coral Wire edition of Sun, Nov 1 2026 · Coral Index 31/100 (Storm warning)