The foreign rights scammer is back, and I guess he wants to remind me yet again about the sheer chaos and futility of perfectionism on my chosen career path
Ask not for whom life's scammers and parasocial haters type middle-finger emojis; they type for thee.
Oh, for crying out loud. I thought we were done with this, but no.
Let me rewind: does the phrase “foreign rights scammer” mean anything to you?
If not, here’s the deal: for around six years, from 2016 through 2022, a mysterious individual dogged just about all of us who buy and sell book rights for a living. We called him by various names: The Foreign Rights Scammer; The Scammer; The Hacker; and That Fucking Guy, although for a long time we weren’t sure if he was a guy (or even an individual). New York Magazine eventually rebranded him as “The Spine Collector.”
What this guy did was steal manuscripts via social engineering. He impersonated dozens and dozens of agents, scouts, and editors over email, all over the world, in multiple languages, all day long, in a seemingly relentless quest to get his hands on copies of as-yet-unpublished novels, most of which weren’t even embargoed.1
Here’s the weird thing: once this guy was successful in stealing a manuscript — and he was, a lot — he appeared to do nothing whatsoever with it. He sold no black-market ebooks. He self-published no plagiarized content. He was stealing manuscripts just because — and he was driving all of us nuts in the process.
The guy came for just about everyone Kent and I knew, one at a time; eventually, he also came for us. He used a spoof “@neonliteracy.com” address, correctly incorporating most (but not all!) of the distinctive details on our email signature. He emailed one of our co-agents asking for a copy of one of our manuscripts, and — because she was smart, and suspicious — she responded by manually typing the correct email address instead of hitting “reply.” So that’s how we knew.
At the urging of a former FBI agent we knew — hi, Jim! Thanks, Jim — we reported this to the FBI back in 2020. It turned out that Penguin Random House had already contacted the FBI themselves. Together with many other agents, scouts, and publishers who ended up contributing evidence — this episode really brought the band together! — we were thrilled when the FBI finally made an arrest in 2022.
Our scammer was apparently Filippo Bernardini, a largely-unknown and now-fired rights coordinator for Simon & Schuster UK. Who would’ve thought?
Few of us save the prosecutor wanted Bernardini to go to jail, and he didn’t; he just got deportation and a hefty fine. All we wanted was to stop getting impersonated online. We wanted our cybersecurity back; we wanted to use email without fearing violation (or own and — worse — our clients’). And then it was over and we could all breathe again.
Right?
WRONG. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Sigh.
It’s book publishing, Bernice. The cuckoos never leave the nest for long.