Well this wasn’t what I was expecting when Uranus squared my Sun!

I recently received an email from one of my lovely readers with a strange tale about how they’d been contacted by ‘me’ – or somebody claiming to be me – who then asked them for money.

Initially the scammer thanked them for buying me a coffee and for their “consistent comments & engagement” before encouraging further communication via WhatsApp. The reader instead offered to connect via Signal and spent a few hours chatting with this ‘person’ on spiritual subjects until the possibility for meeting in person was raised.

This was when the scammer began the process of trying to extract money. They then revealed their ignorance by saying they would check “with the embassy to learn the cost of her ticket.” The scammer knew I was based in the UK so why would an embassy need to be involved?

Big red flag, to add to all the other big red flags now flapping in gale force scam winds. 🚩🚩🚩🚩

Our intrepid reader stayed in the chat with this ‘person’ for so long:

“because it was truly well crafted, which was intriguing to me & I was amazed at how closely her comments seemed to resemble the actual real experience of interacting with an AI agent always pleasantly…”

That’s probably because it was an AI agent.

It’s easy to use some kind of bot to scrape information from a website and extract enough detail and images to fool people. A scammer can easily make themselves appear sophisticated using AI – more so now than ever before. But this particular scammer didn’t want to discuss astrology! Our reader explains:

“This person is very charming & comes across as genuine & sincere & I would say also insightfully wise & spiritually deep. However, there is also a slight element of ‘all things hidden’, enough so that I admit to having substantive doubts about the reality of the situation.”

They go on:

“…although it was almost mystically an enjoyable experience, every time I attempted to reference astrology…I was then ‘re-directed’ by some ‘spiritual talk’ away from that topic. It was obvious that ‘she’ had no functional knowledge, experience, or real awareness of serious level astrology, even enough to comment, which again was an obvious huge red warning flag.”

Thankfully, the reader saw through the scam and got in touch to warn me.

And now I’m warning you.

The scammer got the reader’s email address from the name they used on Buy Me A Coffee. The names aren’t hidden on that site even if you make your comment private. That means there could be others who get targeted by this scammer. I’m going to state this very clearly:

I would never cold call or contact readers or supporters. And I would certainly never suggest meeting up or try to extract money.

If you have donated via Buy Me A Coffee and are worried about this. Please get in touch and I can check to see if your details are on display. It’s only an issue if you used your email address as a name. Unfortunately I can’t remove or edit this once it’s there – but at least now you’re forewarned.

If this scammer does contact you, you have my permission to tell them to go boil their head. You may want to collect their email address, phone number and/or IP address and report them, although these can be spoofed using VPNs, etc. so it’s hard to know exactly where somebody is. 🤬

AI scams are exploding across the internet and the situation will only continue to get worse. All sorts of people get impersonated, including famous authors. The Writer Beware website even has an Impersonation List with what to look out for and a comprehensive Overseas Scams List. The Writer’s Guild also has a guide for authors on how to protect against scammers.

These people pretend to be somebody with authenticity, integrity and talent because they can’t do it themselves for real – because they’re too lazy and too much of a coward. Karma will reward them handsomely.

Be careful out there. 🧐

Image: Woman