The writing world may have reached Peak Scam: the point at which the extreme prevalence of writing scams can be leveraged to create a protection racket to exploit the victims of those scams.
Kind of like paying the people who’d beat you up and burn down your business to defend you against the people who’d beat you up and burn down your business. Nice little sum of money you lost there, let us help you lose some more! (Also see my post from last week, which features a protection racket run by a scammer impersonating Writer Beware.)
Meet Book Guard. Its motto: Peace of Mind is not expensive, it’s Priceless! Its purported mission: to protect vulnerable authors against “deceitful schemes that promise success.”
Here’s the email it is blasting out, reported to me by several authors who received it in the last week. Sent via the SendPulse marketing platform, it features an alarming ALL CAPS subject line–AUTHOR GOT SCAMMED, YOU ARE NEXT!–and text and graphics that are…well, see for yourself.
Warnings about Author Solutions, fake publishers and literary agents, junk marketers, email and phone solicitation, imposters…why, it’s almost like they’re channeling Writer Beware!
Book Guard is registered as an LLC in Wyoming (whose lenient business laws and low filing fees make it a popular choice for dodgy out-of-state and foreign enterprises), with a filing date of April 26, 2024. Its address–1309 Coffeen Avenue, Sheridan WY–is not a physical location, but a virtual address used by hundreds of other LLCs; it is not quite as notorious a home for fraudsters as another Wyoming business address, but it has housed its share of scams.
Per its website, Book Guard’s Comprehensive Protection for Authors includes a Research Team (which conducts “thorough investigations” of questionable companies), Fraud Analysis (“We track unauthorized sales and uncover deceptive practices”), Writing Insurance (financial protection for authors! Book Guard will recover your money!), and Global Monitoring (tracking down unauthorized sales).
Sounds impressive! But there’s no in-depth detail on how any of this works, nor does Book Guard offer examples of successful cases (which you’d expect a reputable business to do), despite claiming to have helped “thousands” of writers. The website does feature two testimonial videos, in which (verifiably real) authors describe their and their friends’ experiences with scammers–but though both authors enthusiastically plug Book Guard, neither actually says that they’ve used its services. (They also can’t, as claimed, have been Book Guard Members since 2022 and 2023, respectively–given that Book Guard didn’t exist before last April.)
The sloppily-formatted Meet Our Team section of the website offers more proof that Book Guard is relying on potential customers not to do any double-checking. Here’s Head of Research Tyrese Camp…also known on free image site Unsplash as Men’s Black and White Suit. At least nineteen other websites use his image.
Other staffers include Senior Fraud Analyst Shelly Cuevas, whose friendly-looking stock photo has been deployed even more often than Tyrese’s, and “visionary” founder and CEO Stephen Hayes, who claims “extensive experience in both the publishing and cybsersecurity industries” but conveniently offers no verifiable specifics. Stephen’s photo doesn’t appear to be stock, nor does it scream “created by AI”–but given the dubious authenticity of the other two staffers, is there any reason to assume Stephen is any more credible?
The end game, as always, is money. The email solicitation invites authors to “Get Started for Free”, and clicking the provided button does lead to a free signup page (I signed up under one of my alternate online identities and as yet have received no response). But the “Become a Member Today!” button on the website takes you here: a Book Guard “subscription package” promising various goodies for the rather odd amount of $28.88 per month. If you proceed to payment, the fine print indicates that this is a repeating charge.
Cheesy emails, dubious business address, fake staff members, lack of any track record: what does it all add up to? I admit I’m on the fence. On the one hand, Book Guard could certainly be an outright scam–run, perhaps, by the very scammers it purports to pursue. No one knows better how numerous scams are, and how desperate authors are to avoid them, than the people running the Philippine boiler rooms; surely it will have occurred to someone to mine that for profit. (I believe they call this vertical integration.)
On the other hand, Book Guard is notably amateurish and sloppy (its website, for example, was created with SeedProd, a drag-and-drop WordPress website builder, and even by that standard is really poorly made). To me it seems just as plausible that it’s a venture launched by a scam victim whose own bad experience gave them a business idea, and who isn’t above a little fakery to make themselves seem credible. This is from the home page; might Stephen Hayes be real after all?
It wouldn’t even be so hard to deliver the assessments and warnings promised on the Book Guard membership page: all you’d have to do is check Writer Beware now and then and “borrow” our material.
Regardless, there’s not a lot of functional difference between paying for an incompetent service and paying for a fraudulent one: you still wind up out of pocket with nothing to show for it. Scam or homegrown business, Book Guard is predatory. And it’s not hard to see the appeal of what it’s selling.
Writer beware!
UPDATE 11/25/24: Submitted for your amusement.
Scammers are among my most faithful followers. They read this blog and check my social media. So it’s no surprise that within days if not hours of this blog post going online, Book Guard found out about it and, in retaliation, decided to subject me to what they obviously thought was an epic troll: putting ME on their website as their founder!
I mean–really, guys? This is feeble. You aren’t even trying to seem credible.
My big ol’ face replaces the original Meet Our Team section of the webpage, which included the stock photos of the imaginary staff members (sorry, Tyrese and Shelly). Unfortunately, in the process of making this change, the Book Guard folks managed to cut off part of the What We Do section, where they detail all the wonderful services they provide. Web design geniuses, they are not.
As stupid as this is, it could be confusing to writers, especially since Book Guard is spamming its services. I’ve requested legal advice. Stay tuned!
UPDATE 12/1/24: I sent a DMCA notice for my photo to Book Guard’s web host, which via a circuitous route of mergers and acquisitions turns out to be Bluehost. I checked in today, and they’ve removed the entire section.
Wow! I hadn’t heard of this one. Thanks for sharing! It’s mind boggling how people work so hard to scam others. What a world.
You must have shaken them. Under “Meet Our Team” there is no one listed at the moment. Well done!
Just finished writing my 3rd Novel and I have received the same email like this, So I guess the sweet little old lady with her video testimonial under their community page is also scammer like you Victoria. Don’t think they would dare to embarrass themselves promoting a scam company.
I don’t know which one to believe now. What do you make out of these?
I don’t think the authors in the video testimonials are scammers. I think they’ve been deceived. (I also think it’s possible they may have paid for their testimonials, though of course I can’t say for sure.) If you listen to the testimonials, you’ll note that although they describe how great Book Guard is, they never actually confirm that they’ve used its services.
When I first saw this I was thinking “Good Job! Got another one!” But I went and looked at it again now shows writers beware as the owners and operators?
I do not know what to think now.
Going to the about section of this said scam website, Seeing Victoria’s face made me say wow. That’s a hell of a marketing strategy you got there.
LOL, this is too funny. Obviously they saw my post and now are trolling me (to be clear, I have nothing to do with Book Guard). I will make beautiful fun of them now. Thanks for commenting!
When I first saw this I was thinking “Good Job! Got another one!” But I went and looked at it again now shows writers beware as the owners and operators?
I do not know what to think now. Like wtf?
https://book-guard.com/about/
With my thanks and appreciation for your service.
Even the cartoon image of the sheep (in the Check Out Our Book Guard Community block) has been hacked. That’s the same iconic sheep that The Book Shepherd – Judith Briles – has used for years.
Ha! I just checked the Judith Briles article that includes the sheep, and Book Guard “borrowed” not just the sheep image, but the cow image as well.
Has there been any article on small publishers to avoid?
I’ve written many posts about small presses. Under the Categories list on the blog homepage, click Small Press Complaints. The Small Presses page of the Writer Beware website is also a good general resource: http://www.writerbeware.com/
Good review.
The bad guys are not worried. They are good at being bad guys. Unfortunately, it’s the good guys who get hurt. Fortunately for all of us, there are more good guys than bad guys in our society.
Just like a weeds in our flower patch, we have to pull the weeds and enjoy the flowers. But those darn weeds keep coming back!!!
Make it a great day. Doc
Thank you for the warning, Victoria.
thanks!
Thank you for the warning, Victoria. Your help is precious.
Excellent article as usual. Authors are amazingly intimidated or lazy about exercising their due diligence when it comes to meeting an agent, publisher, or hybrid publisher. After many years as a literary lawyer and publishing consultant, I still find it surprising because most authors are very fearful of being taken advantage of. Yet, once offered a contract, fears and common sense fly far away. They don’t seem to realize that the same creative intelligence and enthusiasm that leads them to write can also be of use to protect their interests.
It’s because our creativity is too busy creating dreams of success. We tell ourselves that it is about time someone realized how amazing we are. Frankly, I hate that the Internet is the new source of knowledge in this business. In a world where anyone can set up a website, how can I tell if any website is legit? I do google searches, but all links tend to loop back on themselves. How can I tell if any literary agency is real? How do I know you’re really a literary lawyer? I’ve been using the same travel agency for twenty years because so far they don’t appear to have sold off my credit card number.
Thank you. Very grateful.
DAAAAAAMMMNN!!!
That’s just a cryin’ shame. Especially when it would be an honor to do such a necessary job for a living.
Thank you so much for this information. I’m sure I have come across Book Guard in my email. It seems very familiar.
Since GET STARTED did not move, I wonder if a fable is given to us.
Thanks for all you do, Victoria. It’s nice to have somebody on our side!
I don’t have to be a medium to channel Ann’s possible reaction:
“Jumping Jehoshaphat! I do believe we’ve come ‘fool circle,’ because I have definitely seen it all now!”
And VoxTango1 might have opined:
“28.88? Such ‘figures’ indicate the measurements of a cone-shaped walrus! Or perhaps a bowling pin of doom!
“(However, I confess, I am no egghead of geometry. Alas.)”
This article made my day. Thank you.
I am Canadian, grew up in Hungary where I still have friends and family. They can’t afford to visit me, so I go back and do the rounds to towns and villages visiting relatives. Books and television shows from the west are very popular among Hungarians who dream of the good life like they see on “Dallas”. I visited book stores, leafed through many on display. Translation is big business, both ways. The author in Canada may never know that her his/english language book is hot commodity in hungarian translation, title and author’s name plus a few sentences here and there changed as protection against accusation of literary theft. Who does this to you? Establish literary agents experts and lords in the vast publishing universe.
I’ve read about students from Africa in America constantly harassed by relatives back home for gifts because they assume, thanks to TV, everyone in America is living well.
Eh, protection rackets seem to work for organized crime, so they might work for disorganized crime.
What’s annoying in reading about scams is that the vast majority can be avoided by following one simple rule: money should flow to you, not from you.
Thanks for the warning! I shared it on my FB page, Mary Kennedy