Sadly, I’ve had to add the following to my ‘About’ page…
IMPORTANT: Please be aware that beginning May/June 2026 someone has been impersonating me to approach authors. They are calling themselves Anna BookBel with a space and are using the email address: anna.book.bel2@gmail.com and have scraped my gravatar image. As I’m not the target of the scam, there’s very little I can do but it might be worth forwarding the email to your country’s cyber security authorities (report@phishing.gov.uk if you’re British or ic3.gov if you’re American). They need the original email headers to investigate which I’m unable to provide.
I am indebted to indie author MM Ward, who contacted me with the details. She’d been approached by a scammer pretending to be me about a deal. They’d scraped my gravatar image, and set up a closeish email address as you can see, but luckily it struck her as wrong.
Apparently these approaches are rife, which is very sad, and also scary. It happened to Susan at A Life in Books too, and she kindly let me adapt the text she’s added to her About page for my own. It’s not just bloggers who are being impersonated, either, literary agents, publishers and more.
So please, be careful out there.
If there’s anything at all phishy in an email address, misspellings, odd syntax or unexpected wordings in text, treat it with utmost caution. Block and report. Take Five in the UK, has loads of good information about all types of scams.
I saw your post about this on X, Annabel, and it’s very alarming. Hopefully people will be smart enough to realise that it’s not genuine…
You’re in good company, I think, with well known broadcasters etc. Thanks for the warning. But eek! I probably need to keep a better eye on my very neglected blog, in case anyone is looking for forgotten sites to hijack
How horrible. Thank you for highlighting this.
Oh no! That’s awful Annabel.
The worst thing about this for me was finding out I could do little or nothing to stop it, worrying about authors who might fall victim to it.
Given that I’ve had bots crawling all over my blog this year – making my stats nonsense through multiple 1000s of visits a day from the US, Singapore and Taiwan when I used to get about 200 a day total worldwide – frankly, although I was shocked I wasn’t surprised. Not surprisingly, there seems to be little WordPress can do about that either (I did ask).
I am so sorry this happened to you
Thanks Emma. It’s intensely irritating, offensive and not a little scary, but I wouldn’t have known if the author hadn’t taken the time to check me out properly and let me know.
This is incredibly annoying and very alarming. I’ve had bots crawling all over my site, too, and I just hope it doesn’t happen to me, too. As you say – you can’t know it has until someone figures it out and informs you! It’s immensely frustrating that there’s so little to be done about it. WordPress needs to sort itself out.
I’m so sorry this happened to you. I just got an email from this impersonator and almost emailed back as they are using AI to write these scam emails. I figured I should check out the website before I go off half-cocked at this person…so I googled Anna Bookbel and found this post. I hope you get this sorted. It’s great that you’re letting your readers know here, on your blog, and through social media. I will report the email I received as a scam. As a writer, I have learned to recognize an AI-slop-written-scam-emails from a mile away (a lot of my writer friends can too, so hopefully no one falls for this!). But I would love to connect if you’re into mysteries as I am a novelist and indie book publisher.
Thank you Crystal. Much appreciated. Hopefully no one will fall for this.
I can’t believe this happened to you! Thanks for letting us know and let’s hope it won’t spread to other bloggers.
Ugh, this is horrible. I got slews of the emails myself for a while, easy to spot for me as they were claiming I was all sorts of authors who I have reviewed – including Iris Murdoch (I did naughtily write back to that one saying oh no, she has died!). I haven’t had one “from” you but it’s good to know what to do if I get impersonated, so thank you.
I had the same thing happen to me in February with a children’s book author — I felt so bad when she contacted me via my blog and let me know about it. The Gmail address the scammer set up was similar to mine. I couldn’t decide who to contact as I was pretty sure Gmail and WordPress wouldn’t want to know. As it’s only happened the once that I know of, I didn’t want to do a whole post about it or edit my About page. But maybe I should. I have forwarded the scam message to the phishing address, so thanks for letting me know about that.
I’ve heard back from two US indie authors now re the person scamming me. So I felt I had to cover my bases and post everywhere!