Scammers lie. AI helps them lie better.

This is a followup on Tuesday’s post about a likely author scam called Hunt Down We Read.

To be as fair as possible, I invited the person offering me this incredible community review service to respond publicly to the scammy elements I’d posted about, and I included a link to the blog post. They replied to my email.

Scammers lie

It’s instructive to see elements of their email response, because they show just how far scammers are willing to go . . . and how little regard they have for the truth. Not only will they say anything, they’ll use AI to make their lies as convincing as possible. Most of us operate on the assumption that while AI makes mistakes (hallucinations), it doesn’t lie on purpose. But given the right prompt and the right model, it lies shamelessly.

The AI detector Pangram rated the email they sent me as 100% AI-generated, just like the original pitch. I’m certain they just told an AI to respond to my post with whatever statements, true or not, would be most convincing.

Here are some parts of the email response and why I think they’re lies:

Hi Josh,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond publicly.

Only a bot doesn’t understand that “respond publicly” doesn’t mean sending an email, it requires posting somewhere public.

I understand why the email raised your suspicion. Authors receive an enormous amount of low-quality outreach, and much of it is automated, poorly researched, and ultimately designed to sell something. I can see why you looked at my message and thought, “Is this another one?”

So rather than asking anyone to simply take my word for it, let me explain what Hunt Down We Read actually is and what happened here.

First, Hunt Down We Read is not a publishing company, literary agency, or conventional book-marketing corporation. We are a reader-led community built around something much simpler: we love books, we like discussing them seriously, and we want good books to reach readers who will actually engage with them.

That distinction matters because the purpose of the Reading Challenge is not to find books to sell to authors. Our readers nominate books they want to read. Those books go through our screening process, and the readers then vote on the books they want to experience in an upcoming challenge.

Bullshit. Hunt Down We Read is a scam that attempts to suck money out of vulnerable authors, delivering nothing of value in return. If it were legit, they would have responded to my accusations publicly, not sent a self-serving email response.

That is what happened with Marketing to the Entitled Consumer. It had already been selected by our readers before I contacted you.

That is also why you found the book on our website. We feature books that are part of what our community is reading and discussing. Finding a selected book on our site is therefore not evidence that we approached the author first and then created a reason to promote the book. The book was there because it had already entered our reading process.

. . .

On the selection process

You are right to be skeptical of any operation where an author can simply pay to get a book selected.

That is not the principle behind our Reading Challenge.

Selection and author participation are separate things. A book has to come through the reader process first. Payment is not supposed to determine which books readers choose.

That separation is important to us because otherwise the reader vote would have no meaning.

This is total crap. No one “selected” this book, or the other book I ghostwrote that they pitched with the same supposed selection method at the same time. The selected my book because somewhere there is a database with the name of my book and my email address as an author (even though I’m actually the ghostwriter)

On why I contacted you

You raised a fair question about why I contacted you when you were the ghostwriter of the book.

The simple answer is that I was looking at the book and the people publicly associated with it, and I addressed the people connected to the work together. In retrospect, I should have been more precise about each person’s role rather than assuming that distinction would be obvious.

That is on me.

Or, they pitched me because they had my email address, and not the email addresses of the actual authors. Which do you believe?

On the AI-detector point

You mentioned that two AI detectors classified my email as AI-generated.

I understand why that would raise an eyebrow, especially given the kind of outreach authors are now receiving.

The email was deliberately written in a polished, highly structured style, and I can see how that style could trigger those tools. But whatever a detector says, the more important question is whether the claims in the email are true.

So I would rather have you judge the actual facts of what we do than ask anyone to rely on a detector score.

Bull. The email was scored as AI because AI wrote it. While I’ve seen Pangram and GPTZero make mistakes, in this case I think it accurately identified an AI-generated pitch. It wasn’t “deliberately written in a polished, highly structure style” (it wasn’t particularly well written or structured), it was dashed off in the least labor-intensive way possible: by asking an AI to do all the writing.

On the #47 reader entry

This one deserves clarification as well.

The appearance of your name at #47 was not intended to represent that you personally had joined Hunt Down We Read, read those books, or written those reviews.

There are other people bearing the same name in the system, which is why your name appearing in that position was a coincidence rather than a record of your participation.

I understand completely why, viewed from your side, that looked strange. A stranger should not have to guess what a leaderboard entry means. If something on the site can reasonably be interpreted that way, then we need to make the presentation clearer.

This is the most transparent lie of of all, the one that proves this scammer can’t be trusted. There are no other people in the world with my name. No one has ever confused my name with somebody else’s.

If I go to the reader participation page in incognito mode, it still rates me as the #47 reader, even though I never signed up. And when my blog readers visit that page, they see themselves as #47, too. We can’t all be people who were mistaken for the same actual reader, can we?

In fact, I have yet to find a place on the site where you can join as a reader. So where did all those supposed readers come from?

So which is more plausible. That they mistook me for another reader, or that there are no actual readers, the whole thing is a scam, and every visitor sees a fake page rating them as reader #47?

On the fact that we offer author participation

Yes, there is a paid participation component.

I don’t think it makes sense to hide that, and I certainly don’t want to pretend that we are something we are not.

But there is a very important distinction between paying for participation in an experience built around a book that readers have selected and paying to buy selection, positive reviews, or a particular reader reaction.

We do not believe an author should be able to purchase a reader’s opinion.

A book has to stand on its own with the people reading it.

That is part of the reason our process is structured the way it is.

This would make sense if there was any actual process, but there’s no evidence that such a process exists, or that any readers are participating in it. No one on the internet has written a single comment about joining this community — the only posts are from a couple authors who were likely intended victims of the scam. Either all of the readers are remarkably quiet about their participation in a reader community, or they don’t exist. Which do you believe?

And finally, the part I think my original email got wrong

. . .

Our readers selected your book, we were preparing to feature it in an upcoming reading challenge, and I wanted to let you know.

I should have trusted that explanation instead of dressing it up.

Lies.

So, Josh, I appreciate the skepticism.

I don’t expect you, or anyone reading your article,  to believe us simply because I say we’re legitimate. I would rather people look at the process, look at what we actually do, ask questions, and make up their own minds.

And if someone decides that Hunt Down We Read isn’t for them, that’s completely fine.

But I hope this at least gives your readers a more accurate picture of what we are: a reader-led community trying, in our own small way, to help worthwhile books reach people who will genuinely read them.

More lies. If there were any readers, there would be evidence of what they did.

If the site were legitimate, the person who contacted me would be identified on LinkedIn as working for them.

And they’d probably comment in this discussion of their site as a scam on the Kindle Direct Publishing community.

AI wants you to believe it

One of the biggest dangers with AI is that it is inclined to tell you what you want to hear. It’s obsequious. If you use AI to help you write or do any other task, you must prompt it to tell you what you don’t want to hear, because its toadying suck-up responses will blind you to the weaknesses in your work.

The same quality makes it ideal for lying to people to get them to participate in a scam. It’s very persuasive.

For authors, it’s very simple. Do not respond to any unsolicited pitch for any service, especially “book clubs” or Amazon/Goodreads reviews. Beware appeals to your ego and your love for the book you wrote. If a legitimate author or thinker recommends it, it might be worth doing. But if not, you’re probably being invited to join a service that doesn’t actually exist.