The state of New York on Wednesday announced a judgment against an Internet literary agency that coaxed aspiring writers into shelling out hundreds of dollars, with the phony promise of getting their work published.
"The Internet is playing an increasing role in cases of consumer fraud, and this is just one example of the sort of thing consumers have to look out for," said Caitlin Halligan, head of the state attorney general's new Internet Bureau.
New York County Supreme Court Justice Abdus-Salaam found that the Woodside Literary Agency of Queens misled its clients and misrepresented its services.
Woodside charged aspiring writers an initial US$150 "readers fee" when they submitted manuscripts. Halligan said it was unheard of for legitimate literary agencies to charge fees for reading manuscripts.
An agency representative would contact the writer after a manuscript was submitted, invariably lavishing the writer with praise and saying the work was "publishable." At that point, the agency would request hundreds of dollars more from the writer, for "further review" and the cost of "processing manuscripts," according to the attorney general's office.
Abdus-Salaam recently ordered the agency to stop its Internet-publishing scheme, provide restitution to consumers, pay penalties, and post a $100,000 bond to protect consumers in future business dealings.
Efforts to contact the Woodside agency for comment failed. There was no directory listing for the company in Queens, and a Web search was fruitless.
Ironically, the case was originally brought to the attention of law-enforcement agencies by visitors to writers' Usenet groups, who were initially irritated by the company's aggressive email ad campaign.
As hostility toward the literary agency grew among the Usenet newsgroup misc.writing, regular Usenet readers started to email each other with stories of the agency's potential fraud.
A group of misc.writing readers got together and held a "bad writing" contest, then submitted the worst of the writing to the Woodside Literary Agency. All but one of the writers was told that they were among the exclusive one-in-20 applicants accepted for representation by the agency. Then they were all asked for more money, according to the attorney general's office.
According to an affidavit filed in a separate civil case by a misc.writing user named Jayne Hitchcock, who posted complaints about her treatment by Woodside, the owner -- known variously as James Leonard or John Lawrence -- began harassing her with email.
He went so far as to forge posts that appeared to come from her own email address, Hitchcock alleged. One contained her phone number and address and claimed she was seeking people to act out her sado-masochistic sexual fantasies.
Eric Wenger, an assistant attorney general in the New York state office, said there were a number of cases where Woodside harassed writers who attempted to warn others of the scam over the Internet.
"The interesting thing is that the medium of the Internet allowed all these writers and concerned consumers, from all over the country and even the world, to find out about each other, and share their experiences and warnings about this agency. They could never have warned each other so efficiently without the Internet," Wenger said.
