Home For Fiction – Blog

It’s no accident “scammers” and “spammers” are only one letter apart. In most cases, their roles overlap. That is to say, scammers send a massive number of unsolicited email (spam) hoping a few naive people will take the bait.

Obviously, Home for Fiction also receives some such traffic. I’ve several safeguards in place, so I can’t complain, and ever since I moved Home for Fiction to a different server, which I control fully, the situation has improved further, as now I can implement more fine-tuned defenses.

Still, every now and then messages by scammers and spammers get through. And that’s fine, because they’re hilarious! So here are 5 ridiculous such emails I’ve received, for me (and you) to have a laugh with.

Stupid Scammers, Spammers Fearing Success

Before we start, a couple of words on practicalities: First of all, I don’t bother sharing the actual content of these emails. I’ve deleted most of them (though I’ve kept a couple); plus, I don’t want to pollute Home for Fiction with the text verbatim.

Furthermore, understand that these kinds of emails are nowhere near unique. In other words, I’ve received several similar such emails, occasionally in slightly modified form, so we could consider these as email categories.

Finally, just to put a narrative twist on this, I’m listing these in a reverse order: I want to end up with what I think is the crown jewel of scam emailing. 😀

#5: “For Immediate Release: Joe D. Moron, Unknown Author, Has a New Book”

Sometimes I get some funny emails from some idiot (or their “marketing expert”) who thinks they’re smart. They structure it like a press release to announce a new book, as if I could give a shit about some utterly unknown author releasing yet another fantasy-fiction novel.

I don’t even care about so-called famous authors releasing new novels.

Like, do these tricks actually work? Are there people who get an entirely unwanted email and think “I need to get this book as soon as possible”?

#4: “Serious Errors on Home for Fiction”

Quite a few of the silly spam emails I get promise to improve the Home for Fiction SEO. The most daring of them say there are serious errors which they’d be happy to reveal in a scheduled call. (Hmm… maybe we ought to have a laugh, courtesy of OBS)…

I bet these can scare some naive, not digitally-savvy website owners with little technical know-how. It’s the same kind of predatory tricks the likes of Bluehost try to pull, charging you money for supposedly pitching your site to Google or Bing, since Joe User doesn’t necessarily know that’s not at all how it works.

If you’re like Joe, here’s a nutshell version:

• You don’t have to pay money for Google (or any other such search engine) to include your site. It happens automatically.
• You can speed up the process by submitting your sitemap to Google search console or Bing’s Webmasters. There are free online sitemap generators.
• If you want to rank higher, you need to create authentic, high-quality, human texts. This is subjective and, depending on what it is you’re writing about, might be very difficult, but there’s no other way. Sure, you can try to follow SEO strategies or improve the speed of your site – usually this is what these “marketing experts” promise – but at the end of the day, if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.

#3: “Hi Home for Fiction Team”

“I just read your whole website and we have these guest articles we’d like to insert and we could pay well. How much for a paid-post insertion?”

*sigh*

Sometime I’ve almost replied – thinking to either ask for a million euros, just to see how they’ll react, or to tell them just where to insert their email about insertions.

In the unlikely case you’re a “marketing expert” reading this (most of you are functionally illiterate), don’t bother. You’re wasting your time – not mine, I’m laughing my ass of with these.

Oh, and Bill Hicks has a message for you:

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

#2: “You Sell eBikes, right?”

These “marketing experts” are such morons that they don’t even try to focus their efforts. I mean, if I have knives and forks for sale, I’d try pitching them to chefs, restaurants, or, hell, even cooking shows; but certainly not literature and philosophy websites.

So, why the fuck do they think they stand a chance with pitching eBikes (among many other irrelevant things) to Home for Fiction?

Oh, right; that was my mistake. Thinking requires a functioning brain.

#1: “This Is my Identity, Let me Scam You”

OK, picture this: Someone falsely accuses you of having stolen their property, but they won’t press charges if you send them money. To do so, they give you their address and ask you to mail a cheque there.

Yes, it’s as stupid as it sounds.

So here’s what happened: Someone emailed me from a domain we can call “moronlawyers.net” that, as I checked, had been registered a week earlier. I also got a similar email a couple of days later from “moronlawyers.org”, also registered a couple of days earlier.

They claimed to be an attorney representing a specific company, let’s call them “HomeBuilders”, offering a link to a website for “HomeBuilders”. I’m not 100% sure whether I checked that domain, but I think I did and it was several years old. The website had addresses and phone numbers, and seemed, in all effect, a legitimate home builders’ site.

The “attorney” claimed I had used a photo on Home for Fiction that was copyright-owned by their clients, “HomeBuilders”. Just for reference (a fact ignored by that moron), about 85% of the photos on Home for Fiction are public domain (from Unsplash and Pixabay), another 10% are my photos, and the last 5% are AI-generated. A handful of images are shareable on condition of attributing the source, which I do.

Bottom line: I never use copyrighted material without permission.

Then the “attorney” said there is no point removing the photo, but legal consequences would be avoided if I added a link to the “HomeBuilders” website.

If we assume this business to be legitimate – as it appeared to be the case – there are only two options I can envision here:

• The owner (or a close relative) of “HomeBuilders” tried in this ridiculously moronic way to get some exposure for their website.
• The owner paid some “marketing expert” who came up with this asinine idea.

Frankly, I don’t know what’s worse!