As I head into the last weekend before another birthday, the third weekend of having my house on the market, and having just experienced yet another disappointment in terms of my out-of-state house search, I’m otherwise living the typical bizarre spring fluctuation that seems to happen in every region I’ve resided. That would be the need for both air conditioning and heat in a twelve-hour period. Not to mention socks I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need once temps reached the high eighties by afternoon.
In the midst of this, I’ve aimed to continue working—after more than a month—on my eighth and final Other Worldly novel, Alien Origins, but today is turning out to be one of those world-weary days when focusing is difficult. To wit, my mood is also fluctuating with the currently gloomy weather.
It doesn’t help that I received an emergency email notification from my publisher, BookLocker, also publisher of Writers Weekly, about overseas scammers contacting authors of numerous publishers in an attempt to get us to believe our publisher is no longer in business and has transferred its author accounts to them (the scammers), and that our publisher also owes us unpaid royalties. The scammers conveniently offer to help collect monies owed—if you pay them to do so.
This international cartel currently screwing with US authors is located in Pakistan, the Philippines, and India. They obtain author and publisher information via Amazon, then contact authors by phone, email, or social media to peddle their lies with the ultimate aim of obtaining credit card and/or bank information. They are, unfortunately, very sophisticated and convincing writers who should know better to part with thousands of dollars.
The good news is, to its credit Writers Weekly is actively working to expose these criminal scammers and warn those targeted by them. The bad news is a certain billionaire owner of Facebook aka Meta isn’t. Not only is Zuckerberg’s enterprise not cooperating, Facebook continues to knowingly run paid advertisements for the scammers, profiting from them criminal enterprise. Hence, Writers Weekly warns to never assume that any company paying for ads on that social media site is legitimate. Ya think?
I already assumed this, but I have not been contacted via Facebook by any of these scammers of authors, probably only because my posts on that site aren’t public. Indeed, I remain on Facebook (having ditched Twitter for the same contemptibly corrupt, blatantly partisan, and unfettered greed-mongering practices months ago) simply because it allows me to stay connected to friends from childhood, college, and law school who I would otherwise not be in touch with because they aren’t also on BlueSky.
Zuckerberg is also one of a trio of billionaire oligarchs standing behind the current traitorous travesty of a presidential administration—literally, as all three punks stood behind him at his inaugural swearing in in January. It’s bad enough that Amazon’s Bezos sold out the integrity of the Washington Post, beloved newspaper and news source of my childhood, and that Twitter’s Elon Musk, among a great deal of many other abhorrent acts, feels some deeply disturbed pathological need to make American senior citizens lose sleep over his attacks on Social Security benefits, but when is enough ever enough?
Why do any of these ridiculous excuses for men, who hoard and/or squander their obscene wealth, need to profit from criminal activity at the expense of everyday Americans just doing their creative thing? It’s almost like these billionaires are the ultimate scammers…in addition to being truly traitorous scumbags. Because one thing is for sure. They are far worse than fictitious villains conjured from the very author imaginations targeted by criminal cartels.