Peak Fake: A Scam Website Impersonating Macmillan Publishers

I write a lot about impersonation scams on this blog–for good reason: they are extremely common, and becoming more so all the time. Literary agents, publishers, production companies, film directors: all are targets.

The purpose: money, of course. By posing as real, reputable companies and individuals, the scammers aim to make it more likely writers will be bamboozled into paying for needless, substandard, and/or fraudulent “services”.

This one, though, takes the cake: an entire website impersonating Macmillan Publishers.

The domain name, booksmacmillan.com, is just 15 days old as of this writing (the registration is, of course, anonymized):

The website, which appears to have been hastily put together with just the barest nod to verisimilitude, features poor-quality book cover images on its opening page and a blurry Macmillan logo. There’s a major clue to fakery at the very top:

No major publishing house is going to refer to itself as “traditional” or to its authors as “traditionally published”: it’s a given, since that’s the only kind of publishing they do, and there’s no need to make the distinction. (This is a scam marker in scammers’ solicitation emails as well; even the ones that are otherwise quite credible often make this mistake.)

Visitors are invited to “discover the world of books at Macmillan” with reviews and interviews–but wait, isn’t Macmillan supposed to be a publisher? (And shouldn’t its name have a capital letter?)

The “Vision” page features content plagiarized from the real Macmillan website:

The “Overview” page is, well, not much of an overview (note the same missing capital letter):

Other pages are essentially content-free.

So who’s the scammer behind the curtain? It’s Stellar Literary Press & Media, about which I’ve gotten multiple complaints (I also wrote about it in 2020, when it first appeared). I found out thanks to this comment on Writer Beware’s Facebook alert about Stellar, from a writer who was asked to pay $2,500 as part of the scam:

Which brings me to one more page of the fake Macmillan website, which isn’t included in the menu at the top but appears as a link at the bottom: Author’s Protection.

This, bizarrely, turns out to be a nearly verbatim copy of the entirety of the real Macmillan’s Publishing Fraud Alert page, which identifies a series of scammers–including Stellar–that are either impersonating Macmillan or fraudulently using its name. Hilariously, Stellar has removed itself from its version of the list, and added the names of several other scammers that presumably are competitors. The real Macmillan’s list is in the left-hand column:

Trolling? Colossal cheek? Stupidity? Who knows.

I’ve included as many images as I have in this post because I’m guessing that Fake Macmillan won’t be around for long, and it definitely deserves to be memorialized. Check it out while it’s still checkable!

UPDATE 6/12/24: The website appears to have been disabled. Links still work, but now go to a landing page that’s blank.