Very Weird Solicitation Alert | Hacker News Reader

Very Weird Solicitation Alert

accrispin.blogspot.com

113 pointsilamont30 comments

TLDR - it is implied that a convicted fraudster named Monica Main either coerced an old (and possibly feeble / demented) romance author (Judith McNaught) or stole her identity to fleece wannabe writers out of money. I applaud the author for digging this deep, what an odd scam. It is affinity fraud, except the group is struggling writers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud

Oooh I didn't know this had a name. Family members have fallen victim to this several times to con men that came into their churches and pretended to be "one of them" and had a special ponzi or pyramid scheme from God to share. The churchgoers instantly let their guard down, what an easy con. People in a church already have a tendency to believe in things.

That's exactly why many scam emails start off with some religious salutation. If that doesn't put you off you're worth investing some time in because you have self-identified as gullible mark.

Sounds similar to the Nigerian prince emails in principle.

I don't think the issue is that they "have a tendency to believe in things" so much as they are among of group of people who've voluntarily associated on the basis of shared beliefs. Looking through the article identifies other groups like immigrant communities as other popular targets. The hint is in the "affinity" part.

I knew a guy who did this.

Couldn't believe the amount he took from parishioners.

He moved after his caper.

The minute I met him I knew he was a lying, but felt bad for feeling that way. I felt like I was judging him by race.

If you were aware there's an ongoing scam, I hope you reported him to the relevant authorities.

Check out Stan Johnson of the "Prophecy Club" on YouTube and elsewhere. He's been riding various Evangelical trends since the nineties or even the eighties with promotional tie-ins to various enterprises, e.g. prepper food/technology, silver bullion, prophecy videos and conferences. I can't imagine he's making all that much these days and his hybrid physical/online seems small. He got the COVID-19 a couple of times and didn't bother to tell his still-meeting congregation about it until quite late.

He preys on the gullible ... but in some Black Swan event sort of way (e.g. extended regional power outage) his adherents may come out ahead for a short time.

Similar with Jim Bakker[1]. The guy went to prison for fraud and went straight back to televangelism when he got out and sells buckets of freeze-dried food to his parishioners to prepare for the end times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker

I don't know the details, but some years back my Jehovah's Witness uncle and his family got heavily involved in some pyramid selling scheme for some kind of health powder. Your comment makes me wonder if they were introduced to it by another JW - this would be a very powerful hook, as JWs are incapable of even conceiving that other members of the cult might be up to no good.

The most famous recent example is Bernie Madoff who regularly preyed upon other Jewish people and organizations. Not as explicitly religious as some famous Christian hustles (like various forms of prosperity gospel) but definitely an adjacent kind of affinity fraud. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/madoff-...

The weird thing is- it could be a scam that is not actually a scam. If they have somehow acquired the legal right to use the author's name to release books, they don't need to swindle the ghost writers- they would probably be able to actually sell a decent number of books. The victim of the scam would be the author and her publishing company.

> *Using one of my burner names and emails, I signed the NDA,

Any lawyer want to comment on that?

I’m not a lawyer, but generally when dealing with contracts, the actual “signature” that’s on the “paper” is somewhat inconsequential. Sure, it’s convenient for record keeping, and easy to defend in a court of law, but it’s not the be-all, end-all of consent to a contract.

If you make a good faith effort to convey to a contract participant what is at stake in the contract, (perhaps by writing it out in the form of an NDA) and the intended participant does something to imply consent, like splashing ink on the paper in the spot where it says “by putting ink on this spot I agree to the terms”, or clicking an equivalent button, the participant can be held to the terms regardless of what shape the ink or the pixels make.

In terms of defending your contract in court, this can be another matter entirely. If you don’t have some proof that the participant did actually acknowledge the terms of the contract and consent to the terms willfully, you will find it difficult to enforce the contract.

Depending on the method used for “signing” the NDA, using a burner alias likely has little to no legal difference from actually signing with real name and subsequently flaunting the NDA in the same manner.

However, in terms of getting away with it, the burner alias might be enough to throw off the opponent. No point accusing an anonymous stranger of breach of contract… they need to be deanonymized first to affect damages.

If you can’t deanonymize me, you can’t affect damages to me, regardless of what I sign.

The author of this blogpost is, however, not anonymous, so de-anonymizing is fairly easy, no?

Seems like it. So, in this case in a legal sense, I believe there to be basically no difference to signing with an alias vs signing with real name, particularly since they blogged about doing this.

Would some kind of clean hands argument potentially stop this NDA from being enforceable though?

Is somebody claiming to have signed a contract on a blog post significant evidence that they actually signed it? Can you say “one of these 1000 signatures is probably his pseudonym but I don’t know which one” and have it stand up in court?

Of course it falls apart if the author is compelled to answer in court whether they signed. Then it comes down to whether they are willing to debase themselves by lying.

She said her writing sample was a snippet pasted from one of her novels, so the information to de-anonymize her is there.

I didn’t think about that part (apparently my reading comprehension is bad enough that I also used the wrong pronoun for the author). Assuming Main actually saved the writing samples and does the work to match them all against the author’s novels, then she should be able to pin it down. It will be interesting if we get to see what damages she sues for.

If she is willing to lie she could still say somebody else signed the nda and forwarded her the information to post. I wouldn’t do that personally, but I also wouldn’t think unkindly of somebody who did.

The author of this blog post is probably prepared to risk it, on the assumption that the people that they are writing about really don't want to be in court testifying under oath on this matter.

Not if they cannot connect the poster with a NDA signed by an alias.

Contract is by and large a state law issue and many states have statutes that look askance at format deficiencies and expect signatures to be formatted in certain ways. The judge also has to be able to understand the contract as written to rule on it, so a contract of a smudge would be hard to enforce.

Signing a false name on a contract is fraud. It is different. They would have trouble doing anything if they could not serve you because they didn't know who you were. But if you used an online service to sign the contract, they could serve the company who facilitated it demanding they reveal your identity and doxx you that way.

Y'all are taking this way too seriously. This Monica Main person isn't suing anyone for NDA breach when she knows damn well her whole scheme's a fraud

The trend among frauds and con artists is to double down when caught; it's entirely possible that Monica Main will sue and then use the unresolved court case as pseudoevidence that her enterprise is being attacked by shills of a conspiracy.

Author Beware however has an extremely long track record of calling out fraudsters. Any author who reads a warning from them would do well to take them over the word of any fraudster.

Zoom out a little--hackers tend to be beholden to NDAs and so the legal mechanisms are of interest.

I find it hilarious that something aimed at writers would choose videos as a way to entice them. Wouldn’t text be more convincing? Sure is for me.

The video is two steps into the spiel. First, these recipients have identified themselves somehow as aspiring writers. Second, they found the mailing so compelling they followed the url.

This reminds me of "When Dickens met Dostoevsky"[1].

[1] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/eric-naiman-when-dickens-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com