So here is a new version of a scam that came at me over the last week or so.

Before anything else, I must state that a writer by the name of Sarah Moss is a real author with many published titles all of which are well reviewed.

A short time ago, I received a message on TikTok from Sarah Moss with the handle sarah.moss182 claiming she had come across my novel Flashback and wanted to connect – one writer to another. Naturally, I looked at the details of her profile and, like most writers, I thought it would be nice to connect with her. I looked up her author profile on Goodreads and Amazon and saw that Sarah Moss is a well-published and respected writer.

We messaged back and forth a couple of times. She asked me to exchange book links (Missed Clue #1 – if she was interested in Flashback, all she had to do was look it up on Amazon). She gave me hers – a link to Ghost Wall on Amazon. Then I went to paste my link in a message, but TikTok blocked it because they had to review it as it might be in violation of their TOS (Missed Clue #2 –  that had never happened with any other message exchange). I found that odd and tried to question TikTok what that meant – but admittedly their customer service is pretty poor and that got me nowhere. I told “Sarah” about it and she opened a group chat so we could correspond.

She showed me a graphic she’d ordered mine and it was in her cart. I then did the same for Ghost Wall. A few days later the book arrived and I posted a picture of it and sent it to her as proof that I’d purchased and received her book on the private group chat. She apologized for not having followed through on buying mine.

She mentioned my book didn’t have many reviews (Missed Clue #3 – I don’t think that would generally be a topic one author would talk to another author about). This was followed by her asking if I were open to suggestions. What was I going to say to a successful, well-published and reviewed author while I’m struggling to get my books out into the world?

Now I waited for an email from her book guru, Herbert. By next morning, there it was – Gmail address and all plus “Sarah” wasn’t even copied on the email, nor had “Sarah” copied me on her email to Herbert as would be normal for an email introduction.

I responded:

Guess what happened…

Result?

1 – Now armed against a different form of scam,

2 – I’m out $18.36,

3 – I own a copy of a very good book.

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