Member-only story
The Fake Book Club and the Long Spoon
I sat down one evening to talk about a book.
They said they were a book club. Canadian, if I remember the invitation correctly. Names came through the screen — Jane, Ify, Michael, Festus, James, Imran, Giles. Microphones failed. Accents thickened. Somebody was always in another room. Somebody else asked me to type the question into the chat because I could not hear a word.
I kept talking.
I talked because I had been invited to talk about a little book of mine, and because I still believe that if you have been asked a real question, you answer it as if the person on the other end is real. For a while I thought they were. Then I didn’t. Then I finished the answers anyway.
It was a scam.
A fake book club. I might be the last person on earth to learn about this type of scam. How embarrassing!
I am not proud to say they convinced me to pay them $150. That part of the story is short and I don’t intend to give it more air than it earned. I got my money back in the end, after fighting with the payment processor for a week.
The part that stayed with me is this: I spoke from the heart into a room that was not really filled with enthusiastic readers of my book. but the interview came from…
