I recently received a PM that invited me to reply with an email address. Being the suspicious person I am, I Googled pieces of the message to see if anything came up. Sure enough, several other FFnet authors have received identical messages except for the pen name and fic names. The message is:

From the posts on this forum, it seems like this is a marketing thing for Inkitt, which is apparently a "social platform for writers and readers" that is currently invite only. Not gonna link it since the whole thing seems rather spammy to me.

Any of you that already received something probably ignored it, but here's a heads up anyway. Sorry if this is way obvious or if it's in the wrong place.

 

Interesting, but just ignore it. Best case scenario is it's legit and in that case... do you need help promoting a fanfiction story? Like, who cares?

Worst case scenario is you lose out something important, like the security of your account or something. Just stay away.

 

I might be a bit gullible since it wasn't immediately obvious to me. It's pretty well in-line with most of the PMs I've received there, though it seems more obvious since I've redacted the names.

Also, it probably wasn't clear from my post, but my sole intention is to warn others to be on the lookout for this, since it seems to be a recent thing. I am bad enough at real social platforms where all of my acquaintances are, so even if it was legit it would be entirely useless to me.

 

Anybody got a trashmail account and checked it out? Any message from somebody who got scammed yet?

 

I got that PM a few months ago. Just ignored it.

Assuming it is a campaign for some sort of invite only social platform, I imagine their model is to initially get fanfic writers on it first, and then have them promote it to their readers once it becomes open. I'm sure some writers may feel they were exclusively singled out and join based on that, but I'm sure most will be put off by the way they went about doing it. Really need a new marketing strategy.