Non-Con: AI Scam Companies Are Catfishing Romancelandia
I didn’t want to do it. The teaser chapters were always, somehow, objectively terrible despite the intriguing hooks, and I knew it would only get worse behind the paywall. Yet, for months on Instagram, I was stalked by interesting story blurbs with vivid AI-generated images and “movie” clips that linked to romance subscription apps until one day, curiosity won. I swallowed my embarrassment and purchased a 3-day access just to read the rest of “Virgin Dot Com” on what is attributed to My Passion on Instagram but charged to HW Fantasy Unlimited on PayPal. This in itself is sad, because I despise the over-used, anachronistic, over-aged virgin trope, and I’m not a fan of office romance, but there was something appealing in the evocative porn-ish dialogue of the three brothers, (a.k.a reverse harem) their alpha sex god personalities, and the relationship of these things to the main trope. I hope someone with more time will write a deep enquiry into how these scam apps manage to deliver hooks, plots, and tropes in their marketing that feel more enticing – if only in their potential – than many legitimate romance novels on Amazon. I have a theory – for another day.
“I think the concept of these apps and platforms are fine, but I can read fanfic for free and it’s essentially the same thing. I’ve seen big names on Vella like Rebecca Zanetti, Kandi Steiner, and Christy Caldwell but these authors all have KU titles as well. KU ends up being way more cost efficient for me. “– Reddit poster
Fraud and Regret
Right now, though, I’m just getting this wee rant off my chest so I can focus on what I’m actually supposed to be writing. While I link to a few posts about this racket, and this company in particular, I was surprised to learn how little turned up in a basic Google search. Perhaps this is because these app companies actively scrub negative comments, (tellingly, there are few to no comments of any kind attached to their advertisements) or maybe their read numbers are exaggerated, and the general public is a lot less susceptible to shiny objects than I am. Still, I was under no illusions as to the kind of quality awaiting me, but I figured $1.99 was a tolerable penalty for this small indulgence. What I was not prepared for was the astounding gall of these motherfuckers and their immediate and consistent refusal to refund roughly $30 dollars extra that I did not authorize but that they charged to my card, which I discovered and reported about ten minutes after it posted to my account.
The provoking thing to note isn’t the dollar amount – for context, life is not financially awesome at the moment, but flushing $30 down the toilet won’t break me. To use an antiquated concept, it’s a matter of principle. Honestly, if things got bad enough, I’m pretty sure even at my advanced age, I could get at least $30 for a blow job if I absolutely had to go that route. (This is by no means an insult to blow jobs, which ethically, should always be free like oxygen.)
Fraud and Frankentexts
I think this annoyed me even more because it targets romance, a genre already under constant siege from interlopers and bad faith actors both outside and within Romancelandia. These apps are not just perpetrating fraud against writing, thinking, women, humanity, ethics, and the English language itself, they’re stealing from self-published authors, carving up original work and repackaging it through AI or ghost writers into Frankentexts of gibberish that often aren’t even finished, so readers are left hanging. (Which feels like a dumb complaint when reading it at all is typically an exercise in inchoate incompletion.) And if there really are people out there who find these stories sufficiently satisfying in content and quality – that’s terrifying. On the one hand, this isn’t surprising because we’ve become accustomed to expecting less from everything: art, fiction, film, life. (If you think that’s hyperbole, spend five minutes cruising Goodreads.) On the other hand, we don’t need to tolerate such a slide into mental decay.
This leads me to the tangential issue of the marketing tactics of legitimate indy authors. It’s only recently that scam apps on Instagram (at least in my algorithm) seem to have completely overtaken ads that link to Amazon romance novels published by individual human authors. But those were pretty irritating too. On Amazon, authors have taken to using vague, purpely “vibe” blurbs that don’t give a clue about the plot or provide anything to help a potential reader make an educated guess if it’s something they might be interested in. And digital downloads are not returnable after the day it’s purchased, so if you guessed the wrong vibe, too bad, unless you have KU. These blurbs amount to a random collection of words – many times there is a generalized list of tropes. Authors will claim that this is just the way things are now, and it’s necessary because research shows that attention spans are so short that you only have nanoseconds to capture attention. But if this were irrevocably true, why should we expect readers to focus on an entire book? I don’t want a world where authors write for the bespoke, moralistic attention spans of gnats and not for quality or art or enjoyment or imagination. If someone can’t focus on a blurb for something that they are deeply interested in, then it doesn’t matter what you write. I feel this borders on negligence and I’m so tired of it I tend not to spend the effort to scour Goodreads anymore for basic information the author should have provided. I’ll just skip your book. This approach either treats readers like they’re stupid or encourages them to be, and this seems like a bad approach to take for people who work with language.
On Instagram, indy authors post ads for books from their back catalogue, presumably to boost sales. This in itself is perfectly reasonable. But there’s this trend where the video or photo and excerpt for the ad are wildly mismatched from the blurb and cover the link takes you to, and sometimes doesn’t clearly indicate what the title even is; so it feels like a confusing and annoying bait and switch. Moreover, with rare exception – usually for the occasional book from a well-known author that I already own – romance novels advertised on Instagram have proved to be predominantly terrible in my experience, so much that I hardly click on them anymore because I associate Instagram ads with bad romance novels. Sure, you can say this is subjective, but I could successfully argue that this is not purely the case.
Fraud and Literary Dimentia
Again, I see much less of indy ads on social media like Instagram lately – almost exclusively, my feed is filled with ads for AI romance story apps. This is a bad sign. I realize I’m seeing these ads because the internet knows I like romance. But I want to support independent human authors, not insulting cash grab scams. I want to have confidence that a majority of romance novels I might want to buy or download do not have a high probability of being literal unreadable garbage. If Romancelandia doesn’t stand up for us, no one else is going to. Don’t support these scams with your money or your time. Report them whenever possible – to the BBB, the FTC, and social media platforms. Post on your own social media when they delete your comments on theirs. Warn others when you recognize plagiarism by these apps. They represent artistic theft, intellectual fraud, and a categorical insult to human intelligence—to the very idea that thought or art matter at all. And if that’s not enough, they’re also profoundly disrespectful to romance readers and authors. They contribute to the decline in quality in the genre that so many of us mourn.
And just when it seemed we hit peak idiocracy, there comes the sister to the romance text apps, the short-form video app. Imagine these AI romance novels acted out verbatim in two minute or less bites, acted by people with the aesthetic appeal and charisma of your next-door neighbor’s teenagers, with no chemistry or acting skills. These things are not isolated annoyances, they are symptomatic of a cultural willingness to accept degraded versions of storytelling in the name of convenience and technology. They represent the imposition of greedy interlopers overriding the preferences, voices, and skills of the primarily female residents of Romancelandia.
Fraud and PayPal
Meanwhile, the PayPal Resolution Center states that I can expect a decision on at least one of the three charges by December 21st. Today is August 3rd. I provided clear documentation of the issue, along with screenshots and links to multiple similar claims made online within the last six months. Usually, PayPal temporarily refunds the amount while investigating, but they haven’t done that this time, for some reason. “My Passion / HW Fantasy Unlimited” continues to respond to my detailed demand for a full refund and cancellation with this auto-generated note:
Fraud
Dear Pamela,
We are interested in resolving this issue in the best possible way. That is why we are offering you a 50% refund of the payment amount. At the same time, the service will remain fully available in your account. We hope you will accept our offer and are ready to resolve this issue.
Maybe one day I can laugh about it, like a more fraudulent version of the hotel soap fiasco. But it will probably require the CIA assassin test.
Ps: Reddit posters have managed to find free links to a lot of these stories.
