This isn’t strictly writing-related, but it is the kind of weird rabbit hole I enjoy going down, and it’s a writer (and artist) who drew my attention to it.
The writer got in touch to share an email with me.
![Good afternoon!
My name is Harper and I am reaching for a student of ours, Nora, who has been enjoying the resources on this page: [redacted]
Nora is a part of our summer writers club here at the Fullers Library and comes twice a week to work on her writing skills and any pieces that she may need assistance with. We also enjoy looking together to find some new resources to help her and the other club members, and the resources on your page have been super helpful - Thank you for sharing!
Nora and I also came across a cool article full of resources for writing and becoming an author. She thinks it would be a great addition to your page (and I totally agree!) She also asked if I would share it with to you and I am so proud of her for having the idea. I was thrilled to send it along for her. Here it is: https://llcattorney.com/starting-a-business/all-about-the-writing-business-and-becoming-an-author
It would make Nora's day knowing this article would be helpful to other writers out there! I also have a meeting with her parents this week and I would love to show them. I know they would be SO proud :)
Have a great day,
Nora S. and Harper Reeves
https://www.fullerslibrary.com/](https://writerbeware.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SEO-scam-solicitation.png)
A local library, a young writer, a suggestion for a helpful resource to add to a list of similar helpful resources–sounds pretty normal, right? The writer maintains a page with a large list of links to, among other things, writing and arts organizations, so the suggested article seems like a good fit. Who wouldn’t want to make young Nora’s day?
Well…
The writer told me that they’ve received a number of these emails, with Fullers Library being just the latest of several different organizations or groups, all of which use the same M.O.: citing some sort of learning program, mentioning a student who found the writer’s resources useful, and suggesting a link to an article whose focus is in line with the writer’s other links.
Here’s Nora’s article: a how-to-become-an-author essay that’s pretty superficial, but promotes no egregious errors and references a number of worthwhile resources (even Writer Beware!).
If you look at the URL of the article, though, you’ll notice that it lives on a website that is very much not about writing and publishing: LLCAttorney.com, an online business creation service of uncertain provenance. Why would a business creation service host an article on how to become an author–an article that, moreover, resides on a special page that cannot be accessed from the website proper?
By now, you probably know where this is going.
I googled Fullers Library, and found page after page of mentions of the very same scheme. From Cadillac Garden Club:
CouponFollow.com is a coupon code site.
From the Iowa Poetry Association:
Here’s the link: https://www.titlemax.com/articles/road-trip-activities-for-the-car-poetry-writing/. TitleMax.com is a payday lender.
From the CoExplorer Project:
Here’s the link: https://www.elevators.com/utilizing-rainwater-and-gravity-a-guide-to-rain-gardens/. Elevators.com sells elevators and elevator maintenance.
From the Australian National Choral Association:
Qualtrics is a subscription software service.
That’s just a tiny sampling. All of the websites targeted for Fullers’ link suggestions include resource pages or otherwise offer lists of outbound links, and each suggested link is seeded across multiple recipient sites: for example, a websearch on the rain garden article yields six pages of results, with many different “student” names supposedly responsible for recommending it. The articles are, for the most part, like Nora’s: superficial but not overtly bogus, just the kind of thing that you could believe an enthusiastic young student might find helpful.
As for the sites to which the suggested links direct, in some cases they are a semi-plausible match for the articles they host (for example, an article on paper bag crafts hosted at a printing company, and an article on pickleball hosted at a playground equipment vendor), but more often it’s like the examples above: the article has zero relevance to its host, and isn’t accessible from the host menu. Many of these hosts–some of which are pretty shady-seeming–are home to multiple Fullers-recommended articles.
In other words, Fullers is running a link building scam.
Fullers Library has a website. It’s pretty amateurish, but as a self-described “small hometown library”, maybe that’s not so suspicious, and much of the information you’d expect to find on a library website is present: information on hours, library cards, and activities, as well as a roster of staff (including all the names mentioned above). Just enough verisimilitude, in other words, that the casual visitor–checking up after receiving one of the link request emails, for instance–might not notice what’s missing: any mention of exactly which hometown Fullers serves, or indeed any contact information at all.
Even so, some of Fullers’ targets seem to think they know where it is. The Cadillac Garden Club–the first of the four examples above–believes Fullers is in the UK (even though the Fullers website uses American spellings and lists overdue fines in dollars and cents). The email quoted by the Australian National Choral Association–the fourth example–mentions a “NH” location. But though there really is a Fullers Library in London, it’s not a library, but rather a curiously-named newsagent; and while there’s a Fuller Library in New Hampshire (actually a library), it lacks an “s”.
This seems less like a coincidence of naming than an effort to trick websearches.
Fullers Library is just one face of the scheme. The Lyndhurst STEM Club for Girls, whose convincing-if-you-don’t-look-hard website also provides no address or contact info and includes (by accident, one imagines) an article on soccer with links to a betting site and the kind of downloads that give you malware, promotes some of the same articles as Fullers, as well as plenty of its own. Here’s one of its emails; notice that the suggested article is hosted at TitleMax, the payday lender that hosts several Fullers-recommended articles. Here’s another.
Ditto for the Lakeville Nature Conservancy. Lakeville where? Once again, no location or contact info, but some of the websites that have accepted its recommended links think it’s in Michigan (maybe because there’s a real Lakeville nature preserve in Michigan?) while this one is sure it’s in Minnesota. Also the North Mountain Institute–similarly secretive about its address, which seems odd for an organization that claims to provide tutoring on-site…is it in Wyoming?…or maybe Arizona?
If I kept searching, I’m sure I could find more.
Between the plausible websites and the not-terrible articles, the scheme has gone to some trouble to create a veneer of authenticity. It’s easily enough pierced by someone who looks closely, but just credible enough that many website owners, beguiled by its clever and insidious appeal to help eager students invested in learning, won’t think to question. Hundreds of websites, including universities and advocacy organizations, have bought into this scam (some more than once), and are unwittingly helping sometimes unsavory businesses boost their search engine rankings.
If you have a page of outbound links on your website, you too may hear (or may already have heard!) from a helpful group with a touching request from a student. Don’t fall for it.
UPDATE 7/6/24: I found another, thanks to an alert from a reader who received one of its link-begging emails: Friends of Bay Minette.
Unlike the other four, it identifies itself with a verifiably real place (Bay Minette, Alabama), but otherwise is the same, with a website convincing enough to the casual glance but lacking any address or contact information, and the same solicitation M.O. You can see an example here. The suggested article link is hosted on CouponFollow.com, also home to article links shilled by Fullers Library.
UPDATE 7/24/24: This scam appears to be much more prolific, and longer-lived, than I imagined. This webpage offers a number of example, going back to 2014 (the author has dubbed it the “masqueraded link begging SEO scam”).
To everyone who commented here – including Olivia Ingram who I have had text messaging with about Curtis M’s interest – I have to say that the weird secrecy of where Fuller’s Library is – and lack of reply to my question to Olivia – makes me think about ‘The Order of the Grand Poobah’
What is the point and, as for a supposed-library, how is one able to receive or check out books from a source that refuses to be known? Extremely illogical!
-= Chaz from TN-USA =-
Thank you so much for all the above information. I also received an email from Olivia Ingram about a student “Owen” who found our Mayflower website helpful in doing research about the Pilgrims and wanted to share something else he found, a website selling yachts! I was about to pass this on to our newsletter chair for inclusion in our newsletter and post it on our facebook page… thanks to yʻall I have confirmed itʻs a scam tho when I looked at the Fullers Library website and saw no address my mind starting going down the scam road…
Thank you for this article. I wish I had read it yesterday, not today. I also received an email from Olivia Ingram yesterday, and totally fell for it. Updated my website to include a link to elevators.com to help out inquisitive student “Collin M.” so he could show his parents. Told my writing group about my good deed.
My website is now back to its original state. Sigh.
I’m very thankful I just found your article. As president of a book arts guild I received a request from Olivia Ingram & Collin M. to add a website on the printing press. Like the others, sounds good. I was going to ask more info (like location). No need.
I got an email this week from Olivia Ingram at fullers library about a Boy Scout getting a merit badge about geology. The link went to a reasonable article about geology embedded in a company website selling insurance.
I googled fullers library and found your article, and I’m glad I did. I almost fell for the scam. The lack of any location on the website for fullers library did look suspicious to me.
Anon.
Hi,
Thank you for sharing, I got this e-mail today 4/14/2025.
Hi,
I hope you had a lovely weekend! I’m a children’s librarian from the Fullers Library located in South Carolina. I really wanted to get in touch on behalf of my library to thank you for being such a big help to us! We’re currently hosting a K-12 program for Financial Literacy Month and your page, https://www.myfinancialresourcescenter.com/resources/kids gave us some great resources to share with our students. Thank you so much!!
One of our youngest members, Emma, had the wonderful idea of passing along another helpful resource to you. It’s https://www.financecharts.com/pages/5730-a-glossary-of-stock-market-and-financial-investing-terms and it’s a glossary of stock market and financial investing terms. Learning the terminology really helped her grasp a better understanding on investing, so she hoped it could do the same for others using your page.
Do you think you could include Emma’s suggestion on your page? If you decide to, she would be beyond happy to know she’s made a positive contribution, and that would certainly make my day! Additionally, I’m also hoping it’ll help encourage her to keep up the amazing work and effort she put into program so far.
Hope to hear back from you soon!
All the best and thanks once again,
Olivia Ingram
Got one this week from Olivia Ingram at fullers about a Boy Scout getting a merit badge about printing. The link went to a reasonable article about the history of printing embedded in a web router company.
Did all the same follow up and found your article. Thank you
Steve V, Croton,NY
I received one from “Skye Olley” and her girls’ STEM club at “Fullers Library” thanking me for our Generative AI in Education site and shilling a glossary of AI terms. We already have our own glossary of terms, so the girls didn’t look at our site in any great depth. Ah, well! Googling “Skye” led me here, so thanks for the info. Sadly, Googling also revealed some other sites that link to pages shilled by “Skye” and the gang and mentioning them as the source of the link. I wonder if sites displaying these thank you notes are recorded by and exchanged between link beggars as being potentially easy marks?
Yeah, this particular kind of scam is old (and ugly) as sin.
I’ve collected some of them here: https://durval.com/masqueraded_link_begging_seo_email_scam.html
As you can see, one of the samples I posted is back from 2014… so 10 years old at least.
Just got one request from that same “Fullers Library”… was thinking of replying with a derogatory email, so did some research on it first and found your page.
Good job bringing more attention to it!
Thanks for posting the link to your webpage–fascinating that there are so many examples of this and it’s been going on for so long. I’m adding a link to your page to my post.
I just received an email from the Fullers Library. Wording was the exact same as the picture above. The website has no contact info or location. Super sketchy. I Google’d it and found your site. Thank you for sharing this information!
The Fullers Library scam is just another example of people who have nothing better to do than to waste a hapless author’s time and resources on following a worthless rabbit hole.
That is awful, scammers are a real pain
Can you report this shit to google to get these scammers delisted? Tricking the search engines like this must surely be discouraged?
I had one exactly like this from a Holly Spears via “literarycircle . net” email in February of last year claiming to run a lit circle with local high school students, a whole detailed backstory about a specific student who had gotten really into researching . . . much better written spam than usual! but yeah, a coupons site link did not pass the sniff test!
Thanks for identifying another iteration of the scam! It doesn’t seem to have gotten much traction–there is a website (which like the others is devoid of location/contact info) but unlike the others, I wasn’t able to find any sites that acknowledge it.
Hello! thank you for scouting out these schemes for us. I am rather bombarded by fake companies wanting to promote my self-published book, and they offer me movie contracts, book conference exposure, and getting into the agents wish lists. Gosh! What is your eMail, and I will forward some of this crapola to you, if you’d like. I also get many phone calls, and even texts. ARGH! All the best to you, Irene
Sorry you’re being harassed! You aren’t alone. You can contact me by clicking the envelope icon in the header, or by using the Contact box on the blog’s homepage.
Fascinating posting. I thought I was relatively well informed about this kind of activity on the Internet, I had no idea just how insidious it can be! Thank you for your excellent article and good work.
So glad you are exposing these scammers!
Thank you for looking out for us authors! Wouldn’t it be nice if all the schemers and scammers applied their skills to doing good?
What would we do without you, Victoria! Thank you so much for the info.
I’ve requests like this from “Fullers Library.” I ignored them. So glad I did!