Писатель разыграл мошенника, выдав себя за друга радиатора радиопрограммы

Last week I was delighted to receive an email asking to interview me about my book on Materials Requirements Planning, delight which was tempered only by the realization that I had never written a book on that topic. Bella Anna's email said she was an organizer with WKCR and after being impressed with the book (which I didn't write), wanted to give me a featured author interview. This, she assured me, would give me enhanced author presence, increased visibility, exposure to new readers, and promotional support. Any struggling author would leap at the opportunity, since it's always hard for writers to get publicity, especially if your book wasn't published with one of the Big Five publishers. (My self-published books have sold ones and ones of copies.) But alas, I hadn't written the book she wanted to discuss. So, I dutifully emailed her my regrets, saying that although I had written a few books, none of them were on any remotely related topics and she likely had the wrong email address. To my surprise, she replied and said she'd be happy to interview me about any of my books I'd mentioned! I couldn't believe that someone who had been excited to discuss complex business logistics was willing to grant me a feature interview to talk about my rhyming version of the Torah or weird things in Rhode Island! I mean, I literally couldn't believe it. So I looked up the program she said she was running for WKCR, The Literature Humanities Radio Hour: Literary Classics in Conversation, which appears to be Columbia University's radio program for discussing classics like Dante's Inferno or Homer's Odyssey. Hard to believe that list would include Seth's rhyming bible, let alone weird things in Rhode Island or materials requirements planning. I asked Bella for some more information about her program, and she replied that it "features conversations with authors about their books", which is tremendously impressive when you consider that the books being discussed include Dante's Inferno and Homer's Odyssey. I honestly can't name any other podcast that has managed to book Dante Alighieri or Homer, so clearly this was a very elite radio program! Well, either that, or it's a scammer who knows nothing about the program and is just using AI to write emails. Some further web searching suggested this was the more likely option, and indeed turned up countless examples of authors who had received suspicious emails offering them feature interviews on popular programs. Like the email I had received, most of these were from random gmail addresses rather than an email associated with the program, and eventually went on to ask for a "promotional fee" for the interview. So I decided two could play the fake-out game, and replied to Bella Anna and told her that after Googling her program, I noticed that the guy who runs it is an old friend of mine. "I found his email online and told him what a funny coincidence it is that you had accidentally emailed me and that's how I found out he was now running this program at Columbia. I don't know if it would be a conflict of interest to have him be the one who interviews me -- I didn't even think to ask him in my email I was just so surprised -- what do you think?" I'm still waiting for her reply.