Love v. Wiley Book Writers: A Publishing Scam Gets a Rare Comeuppance

Raymond Love just wanted to publish his children’s book with a trustworthy self-publishing company. Instead, he found a scam that took his money and delivered nothing of value.

For most authors in this situation, lost cash and lost dreams are unrecoverable, but Raymond Love’s story has a different ending. He sued–and won.

The legal documents in his case provide fascinating insight not just into the techniques scammers use to bleed their victims of resources–manipulating them with constant and egregious lies into believing that services are being delivered and promises fulfilled–but also the complex web of shell companies and shady operators that keep the scam humming.

The Scam: Wiley Book Writers

In January 2023, Canadian citizen Raymond Love responded to an online ad from a purported Illinois-based company called Wiley Book Writers (WBW), engaging them to provide publishing services and paying $3,200 for a “premium publication package” (WBW’s website is gone but you can see an archived version courtesy of the Wayback Machine). The invoice he received carried the name of a different company, but all seemed on the up and up; there were even assurances on WBW’s About page that it was affiliated with John Wiley & Sons in New York City, a major publisher of academic and scientific books.

In reality, WBW was part of a large group of scams with extensive connections to South Asia, particularly Pakistan. These pose online as publishing, marketing, and distribution service providers, but are really pig butchering schemes, designed to drain their clients of resources through the sale of services and products that may be substandard, fraudulent, or never delivered at all. As part of a smokescreen of fake verisimilitude, they often “borrow” the names of reputable publishers and organizations.

(I’ve written several posts about these scams. Here’s the main one, which describes how they operate and the consequences of using them. I call them ghostwriting scams because in contrast to other foreign scams that target English-speaking writers, virtually all of them sell ghostwriting or book writing services).

Having snagged its client, WBW embarked upon the process of fleecing him. A few months after purchasing the publishing package, WBW offered Mr. Love a “book distribution agreement” that proposed to “distribute 2,000 copies of the Book to Harper Collins [sic] Publishing for sale in the United States of America” (see Exhibit 1 of Mr. Love’s complaint). Not for free, of course–Mr. Love would have to pay a “consolidated sum of $10,000”–but the promised return was more than double, with guaranteed royalties of $24,980.

Book order or book distribution scams are a frequent offering from fraudsters like WBW (here’s another example). Unlike the publishing packages, which are overpriced and often of poor quality but often (though not always) are actually delivered, they are pure fraud: there are no books, there is no distribution, and the big return is a lie to incentivize purchase. The client who pays signals their willingness to hand over large sums of cash, incentivizing the scammers to come back for more.

Mr. Love did pay the $10,000, which was invoiced from a third company name. Two more fraudulent distribution agreements followed, totaling $15,500. More “opportunities” materialized: $1,000 for bogus “copyright proof”; $1,200 for a “showcase” at a fake book fair; $2,160 for fake insurance to “protect you from lawsuits and financial losses”; miscellenous promotional and other offerings, such as a billboard in Times Square; and $10,495 for additional book printing connected to the mythical HarperCollins offer (a fake letter from Harper is exhibit 2 of the complaint), paid to yet another company name.

In October, when royalties from the first book order scam were supposed to arrive, Mr. Love began to ask WBW representatives how to track sales and payments. They responded with excuses and false promises: don’t worry, payment coming soon! He continued to make requests as January, the supposed date of the next royalty disbursement, came and went; WBW continued to fob him off. When he became fed up enough to threaten legal action, they attempted to pacify him by wiring $3,000, promising to pay a similar amount every two weeks.

That too was a lie. The $3,000, plus 50 hardcover copies of his book, were all Mr. Love ever received for his investment of nearly $50,000.

Lost in a Forest of Names

Mr. Love engaged one company to publish his book, paid invoices to three others, and as of this writing, his book remains on sale with yet another company listed as the publisher. He dealt with at least three sales reps, all of whom went by American-sounding names but were likely foreign nationals using aliases. This proliferation of monikers is a typical feature of ghostwriting scams, which use multiple fronts to recruit clients (here’s one especially egregious example) and funnel payments through webs of related businessses.

The three businesses that took payment–Techture, Inc., CodexLab, Inc., and Vox Studios, LLC–are all under common control, according to Mr. Love’s lawsuit:

Additional defendants are Muhammad Khan, the registered agent for Techture (which in addition to having an F rating at the BBB was sued in 2023 by Amazon thanks to its misuse of Amazon trademarks); and Salman Ali Khan, the “managing member” of Vox Studios (which currently runs at least two other ghostscams, Publishing Bridge and 48 Hours Publisher).

It’s probable there are even more that Mr. Love’s lawyers weren’t able to unmask:

Not named as a defendant, but almost certainly a dba of one of the companies named above, is Gnome Book Writing, the current publisher for Mr. Love’s book. Gnome also has an F rating at the BBB. It claims a New York City address, but per the transparency information on its Instagram account, that’s not quite accurate:

The Lawsuit

In April of 2025, Mr. Love filed suit against WBW and associated business names and business owners in District Court in Illinois. The complaint alleged a RICO conspiracy as well as fraud, consumer fraud, and violations of the Lanham Act, and demanded a variety of relief, including removing Mr. Love’s book from sale, compensatory damages including all payments made by Mr. Love, punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees and costs.

Mr. Love’s lawyers were able to successfully serve Onzila Lodhi, Salman Ali Khan, CodexLab, and Vox Studios, all of whom (somewhat to the lawyers’ surprise) responded to the complaint. After some legal maneuvering, including a motion to dismiss by Lodhi and a potential cross-claim against Lodhi by Ali Salman Kahn, the parties arrived in February 2026 at a settlement, with the defendants agreeing to pay a lump sum to Mr. Love by April 30 and accept judgment in the case if payment wasn’t made by that date.

It wasn’t. On August 26, judgment against all four defendants was entered in the amount of $75,000.

As for the other two defendants, Techture and Muhammad Khan, they did not respond to the complaint despite several attempts at service, and in August 2026 the court granted Mr. Love the entire amount of his requested default judgment against them–an extra-hefty sum thanks to the RICO charge:

Difficult But Not Impossible

Most victims of ghostscams and other publishing frauds don’t have the resources or the resolve to take legal action against their defrauders. It’s difficult and expensive–not just financially, but emotionally–especially with scams like WBW, which have foreign connections and opaque business structures and require intensive research to trace them even a little way toward their source. Still, this case shows it can be done.

The challenge, of course, will be collecting on the judgements. So in that sense, the win may be limited. It is a win, though, in that the fraud was recognized by the court. Also, the lawsuit is public record, and turns up on a websearch on any of the defendants.

Often the reaction to the stories of scam victims–especially where the scam is as egregious as WBW’s–is to marvel at how anyone could be dumb enough to fall for something so transparently bogus. The thing is, though, it’s only transparent if you have some prior knowledge and context. Many people who write books don’t have that, because they aren’t looking to make a career: just to publish a story for their kids, or a memoir, or a spiritual testimony. They don’t know–in fact, don’t realize that they need to know–that fraud is rampant in the self-publishing space, that they shouldn’t respond to ads on Facebook or sponsored links on Google, that it’s unwise to accept the claims of online publishing services at face value.

Caveat emptor and all that–but it doesn’t mean they deserve to be ripped off.

Resources

How to avoid scams in the self-publishing space? As with everything related to publishing, it’s important to invest in some knowledge acquisition before jumping in.

The Alliance of Independent Authors is a global professional advocacy group for self-publishers. Its Self-Publishing Advice blog covers subjects of interest to self-publishers, its Watchdog Desk provides scam warnings and other cautions, and it maintains a very useful directory of vetted service providers.

Writer Beware maintains a resource on self-publishing on our website (as distinct from this blog), including a general overview, various warnings and cautions, and links to trustworthy resources.

Ghostscams are everywhere online. They advertise extensively and aggressively–Facebook is a major offender–and pose a major risk for would-be self-publishers. My article on ghostscams can help you recognize them: it covers how they work, the markers that identify them, and the potentially very bad consequences of using them.

The other major scam from overseas targeting English-speaking writers: publishing/marketing scams from the Philippines. These differ from ghostscams in significant ways, including relying on direct solicitation rather than advertising, and poaching already-published writers from their publishers rather than recruiting first-timers, They are also big into impersonation. I’ve been keeping a public list of them since 2018.