famous people wear covid masks to avoid getting hassled as much. and use ebay as an excuse to not sign autographs

If this guy wanted to do bookclubs, he absolutely could. It's not beyond the wit of man to efficiently pick out a genuine request from the slush pile

he is not saying he doesn't want to do bookclubs he is saying he does not want to spend more time to do bookclubs than he previously did, it is not beyond the wit of man to efficiently pick out a genuine request, but even with efficiency time and effort required is not null.

If there is more slush and the fraudulent slush increases in quality and scope it must mean that the wit, effort and time required must also increase to deal with the problem.

Dealing with problems that do not give one a return on the investment seems not worth doing, especially when it turns out the most efficient way to deal with this particular problem is to absolutely refuse to do any book club stuff.

It's not a hard problem to solve. Post a blog post, say include this word in the subject line if you want your request to be considered, route those emails to a separate folder.

Whether there's a thousand spam or a million spam is not at all relevant.

Based on the example emails he posts, the AI bot is NOT scraping his website to individualise the messaging. It isa bulk approach based on ai summaries of the actual books

These scams are a variation of the Nigerian prince scam; they rely on volume mostly