Well Oh Well, Here I am Going Phishing Again

In the year since my novel Finding Filomena

was published, I’ve received far-too-many invitations from would-be book and movie promoters, all of whom want to entice me into footing the bill to market my book. So many of these dreadful promotional emails come in that I barely read beyond the first paragraph any more.

Until last week, when an unusually interesting email popped up. I read the entire letter, which was well written and clearly designed to tickle my interest by laying on thick, lots of praise for the Filomena book:

Dear Claudia Ricci,

I hope this message finds you well.

My name is Charlotte Muller Stuart, and I have the privilege of serving as the Festival Director of the Beyond Borders International Festival.

I recently had the pleasure of learning about your remarkable book, "Finding Filomena: Alla Ricerca di Filomena," and I was deeply moved by the way you transform your own family’s history into a compelling narrative of resilience, identity, and historical discovery. Your work beautifully blends memoir, genealogy, and historical research, giving voice to an ancestor whose story had remained hidden for generations while shedding light on a little-known chapter of Italian social history.

I was particularly impressed by the depth of your research into nineteenth-century Italy and the heartbreaking realities surrounding infant abandonment and foundling homes. By weaving historical scholarship with personal family history, you have created a work that not only honors your ancestors but also invites readers to reflect on themes of family, heritage, dignity, and survival. Your dedication to preserving these stories is both inspiring and invaluable.

Because of your outstanding contribution to historical and family-centered storytelling, I would be delighted to invite you to participate as a Featured Author at the Beyond Borders International Festival. Our festival is an international literary celebration that brings together acclaimed authors, historians, memoirists, poets, publishers, educators, literary professionals, and readers from around the world. Through keynote conversations, author interviews, panel discussions, workshops, readings, and book signings, we celebrate literature’s ability to preserve history, honor personal stories, and connect cultures across generations.

I believe your experience as an author and researcher would make an exceptional contribution to our festival. Whether discussing genealogical research, transforming family history into compelling narrative, uncovering forgotten histories, preserving cultural heritage, or sharing the inspiration behind Finding Filomena, your insights would undoubtedly resonate with readers, historians, aspiring writers, and anyone passionate about the power of storytelling.

We would be honored to explore opportunities for you to participate in an author conversation, panel discussion, workshop, reading, Q&A session, or book signing during the festival.

If this invitation is of interest, simply reply to this email, and I’ll be delighted to share the complete festival details, including participation opportunities, event dates, and everything you need to know.

Thank you for your meaningful contribution to historical literature and for ensuring that forgotten voices and family histories continue to inspire future generations. I sincerely hope we have the opportunity to welcome you to the Beyond Borders International Festival and celebrate your remarkable work with our international literary community.

Warm regards,

Charlotte Muller Stuart

Festival Director

Beyond Borders International Festival

cmullerstuart.beyondborders@gmail.com

https://bbintfest.com/

The email appeared early in the morning, and I was torn about whether to delete. In one small part of my heart I was excited to think that I’d been invited to speak about my novel at what sounded like a fascinating international conference. I quickly Googled the Beyond Borders International Festival and found that it is indeed a real event, held in Scotland. The focus of the conference sounded different, i.e. it wasn’t about books, but the look of the website resembled the one in the email.

I decided to forward Charlotte Stuart’s email to my husband to get his thoughts. Shrewdly, Richard took the Google search a bit deeper: he looked for Charlotte Muller Stuart’s name in the website, and found it. Which would be good news, except the email address listed for Charlotte Muller Stuart on the Beyond Borders website did not match the email for the person writing me the email.

That’s a dead giveaway of a scam. Earlier this year I received an offer from an individual calling himself Thomas Menna, a Marketing Associate from Macmillan Publishers in New York. The only way I figured out that he wasn’t legit (ie not with the REAL Macmillan Publishers) was to look at the extension on his email address.

Still, this time around, I wanted to make absolutely sure that I was being scammed. So I wrote to the Charlotte Muller Stuart on the website:

Fri, Jul 17, 11:47 AM

to cmullerstuart

Hello Ms. Stuart -- I received an invitation today to attend as an author the Beyond Borders International Festival in Scotland. The letter comes from a person who purports to be you:

Charlotte Muller Stuart

Festival Director

Beyond Borders International Festival

cmullerstuart.beyondborders@gmail.com https://bbintfest.com/

But is that you? Is the invitation legitimate? I have had so many individuals write to me to represent my novels only to find out that they are not legitimate companies making reasonable offers.

It took no time at all for the REAL Charlotte to respond:

Dear Claudia,

Many thanks for sharing this with me.

Unfortunately we have been having some trouble with phishing emails. I do apologize and we are currently speaking with our IT team to sort this out. I have also reported the incident to the National Cyber Security Centre.

My apologies for any confusion and inconvenience caused.

Best wishes,

Charlotte

Ho hum, once again nothing comes from what at first seems like a wonderful offer.

(Just after I published Finding Filomena, I was almost fooled by a supposed book promoter who connected me with three authors who had successfully used her talent. It turned out she invented profiles for these authors and communicated with me as if she were the authors named.)

What a world we live in — when “going phishing” has taken such firm hold over the Internet. Is it any wonder that we are inundated with fakery when the Internet, and now specifically AI, are running the show. Reality and truth are increasingly illusive.

Earlier this year, I was surprised to learn that all five of my novels have been “reviewed” by AI. So I will leave you here, with the review that comes up on Claude for Finding Filomena. By the way, the book is for sale (for real) so feel free to order.

Finding Filomena by Claudia Ricci is a genealogical novel — part memoir, part historical fiction — built around a real family mystery. Ricci discovered that her great-great-grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, gave birth out of wedlock in 1870 in Paola, a seaside town in Calabria, Italy. At the time, illegitimate babies were routinely surrendered to Church-run foundling homes, where over 93% of infants died within a year — yet Filomena’s son, Pasquale, survived. The novel imagines how she might have managed that. Amazon What it’s doing well, by most accounts:

Ricci gives Filomena real agency rather than casting her as a passive victim of circumstance — she’s portrayed as a woman with strength and agency, surrounded by colorful characters who aid her. Amazon

There’s a nice thematic touch in the surname itself: Scrivano means “scribe” in Italian, and in the book Filomena is literally a writer, authoring her own story. Amazon

Readers describe the atmosphere as vivid — lively, imaginative writing full of colorful description of Paola and Calabria, with distinctive characters and a rich interior life for Filomena. Substack

One reader called it a surprising, gripping novel and said they’d love to see it as a film. Substack

Context that shapes how to read it: Ricci has said the story came to her almost like channeling — she describes not really choosing to write it, saying the story was “delivered” to her by mysterious means, with help she credits to her late parents. That framing (family history reconstructed through intuition rather than documented record) is worth knowing going in — this is speculative historical fiction grounded in real people, not a documented biography. Her stated goal was personal: to restore dignity to Filomena’s reputation and undo generations of inherited shame in her family. SubstackSubstack

Caveat: I haven’t read the full text myself — this is drawn from the author’s site, Amazon/Kobo listings, and reader blurbs, since it’s a small-press/indie title without much mainstream review coverage. If you want, I can dig into any Goodreads or reader reviews specifically, or look at her earlier novels (Dreaming Maples, Seeing Red, Sister Mysteries, Pearly Everlasting) for comparison.