Bernardini pleaded guilty to wire fraud in January 2023. He avoided prison time but was deported from the United States and ordered to pay US$88,000 ($156,000) in restitution to Penguin Random House.
“At one level, it’s a prank,” the presiding judge, Colleen McMahon, said at the time. “It’s a prank that’s now been inflated into a crime.”
By his own telling, Bernardini was motivated by factors including compulsive behaviour, personal curiosity and professional animus. At his sentencing hearing, his defence lawyer also pointed to an autism diagnosis.
“I never leaked these manuscripts. I wanted to keep them closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them,” he wrote in a letter filed to the judge that year. Having never landed the plum job as a literary agent or scout he so desired, “I still wanted to believe I was part [of] the industry,” he wrote, “even though the industry did not seem to want me.”
“I know that I will not do it again,” he added, “and I have learned my lesson.”
Since then, many in the book business have fallen for a scheme of unknown origin that resembles Bernardini’s work, but with a few twists.
In interviews with the New York Times, more than a dozen authors, agents and literary scouts have described emails from impersonator accounts seeking manuscripts over the past several months. The messages bear the hallmarks of Bernardini’s original scheme: lookalike emails, carefully replicated fonts and signatures, fluency in industry slang and an intimate knowledge of relationships in the book world. Money is never involved.
For at least three years, authors and agents have also been receiving emails from a Gmail address bearing Bernardini’s name, with the surname spelled “Bemardini,” with an “m” in place of the “rn”. (The move recalls one of Bernardini’s original tricks: he often slightly tweaked domain names so that an email appearing to come from penguinrandomhouse.com in fact read “penguinrandornhouse.com,” with an “rn” in place of an “m”.) The messages often contain excerpts from stolen manuscripts with taunts and, usually, middle finger or poop emojis.
Italian novelist Vincenzo Latronico received one such email in May, with an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Una splendida rovina (A Splendid Ruin). Latronico had heard from Bernardini years earlier about another manuscript, and even wrote an article about the scammer for the Italian magazine Internazionale in 2025. Initially, he was amused.
“It was kind of a genius move,” Latronico said, referring to the account’s Gmail address. “It’s like saying, ‘You know, anybody could be doing this.’”
Still, Latronico was concerned. How had this person got hold of his work? Had it been leaked online? He scoured his inbox for phishing emails – as did his Italian agent and editor – and found none. Then Latronico searched for his novel online and found his manuscript free to download online. He also came across a negative review on a small blog called Literary Scout.
At first glance, the website appears to be a run-of-the-mill books blog with reviews of books ranging from debut literary fiction to thrillers, translated works and Zadie Smith’s latest novel. Many of the most recent reviews are of books that have yet to be published.
This alone isn’t a red flag – publishers often share early copies of books with potential reviewers months ahead of a book’s release date. But in several cases, the reviews were posted just days following the announcement of a book deal, before publishers shared the manuscripts widely.
Some of the reviews refer to plot details and character names that have since changed from previous drafts. One review, of Eli Rallo’s debut novel, I Hope Eden Reads This, explicitly refers to sample chapters from a book proposal.
None of the books reviewed received a higher rating than one out of five stars. (Some of the latest reviews feature poop and vomit emojis near the rating.) Cash Out, by Nick Hornby, forthcoming in January, is described as “an overextended anecdote narrated in the same lightly ironic voice for far too long”. Louise Erdrich’s novel I’m Hungry, publishing in April, is called “overlong, overstuffed and structurally hungry”. And Peculiar Stars, by Rebecca Yarros, due out in November, is dismissed as “an overblown trope machine”.
The website’s recent activity and the scornful phishing scheme may be related. A review of Gemma was posted on July 24, the same day Lacey sent her manuscript to the account impersonating her agent – and only two days after the book industry website Publishers Marketplace announced that Farrar, Straus & Giroux had acquired the book.
Perhaps most alarmingly, some manuscripts of unpublished books reviewed on Literary Scout, including Cash Out and I’m Hungry, have also appeared on Z-Library, a so-called shadow library storing millions of titles, in many cases without permission. Several authors confirmed that the reviews contained details exclusive to the manuscripts stored on the website.
It’s unclear who is behind any of these recent schemes, and whether they are the work of Bernardini, a copycat or multiple individuals. Neither Bernardini nor the operator of the Bemardini account responded to requests for comment from the Times.
Soon after this story was published, Literary Scout appeared to take down all its reviews, at least temporarily. The updated landing page included language drawing attention to the killings of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, with an image of the Palestinian flag and a New York Times logo.
It’s difficult to categorise the damage of theft with no obvious financial incentive. Only a handful of unpublished manuscripts that were reviewed on Literary Scout are also on Z-Library. Even so, uncorrected galleys and early copies of anticipated works are often uploaded unlawfully well before a book’s release.
The emails are something of an open secret among publishing professionals. Still, many have refrained from speaking publicly out of concern for being targeted, to avoid any reputational damage and to minimise the attention given to the scheme. As for the blog, much of the book business seems unaware of its existence.
“It’s probably more of a concern now considering how AI has become part of the conversation,” said Kent Wolf, a rights director at the agency Neon Literary. “The question is: ‘What is this person doing with my novel?’”
In the years since Bernardini’s initial arrest, artificial intelligence has infiltrated, and bewildered, the books world. AI has powered phishing scams that target writers, chatbots used on the sly in the writing process and detection tools that have led to cancelled book releases, and it has prompted numerous lawsuits by publishers against tech companies.
Given the rate of the blog’s output, its language – one writer noted most of the descriptions were pulled from online promotional material – and how quickly some of the reviews have been posted after the manuscripts were swindled, some authors are concerned that the thief is feeding the stolen works into AI models. The Times evaluated dozens of the reviews (including those for Gemma, I’m Hungry and Cash Out) using several detection tools, and found it was highly likely that many of them were generated by AI.
“The business model of all these LLM companies is already based on theft,” Lacey said. “So to have somebody that knows how the publishing industry works just aid and abet it? It feels especially bad.”
The nature of the reviews also poses risks for early career authors. Nick Hornby or Louise Erdrich may not lose readers over a negative review on a small blog, but the reputational hit could hurt emerging novelists, including those working in non-English languages, said Latronico. (Perfection, his first novel to be translated into English, was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2025.)
“If my book was out on submission,” he said, “this review would come up as the only review in English. It could do actual damage.”
There are other consequences. Even if the impersonations are ineffective, they could still lead to mistrust in the industry, said Agnes Ahlander Turner, president of the scouting agency Maria B. Campbell Associates, who was impersonated in July.
The timing could not be worse, many industry professionals warn. Authors in particular have been plagued by deceptive AI-generated emails promising to boost visibility in exchange for payment. Over the past several months, alerts about impersonation attempts have become increasingly commonplace below industry email signatures and on publishing websites.
In July, Penguin Random House posted an announcement on Instagram and on its website listing recent literary scams. Scouting agencies have also added layers of security, including password-protected manuscripts and two-factor authentication, to ward off hackers. Still, ignoring scammers is one thing; snuffing them out is another – and virtually impossible.
Agencies have tried to locate such scammers through their IP addresses, and even reported impersonator email addresses to authorities. “The problem is, they shut it down and reopen another one,” said Laurence Laluyaux, the head of RCW International at the RCW Literary Agency.
It can be difficult to keep a lid on drafts once they begin exchanging hands among agents, film and literary scouts, translators and editors abroad. All it takes for a manuscript to leak is a distracted email response or login information to a book scouting database hastily entered on a phishing site.
At first, the Bernardini-style impersonation attempts drew a mix of irritation and amusement from the book business. Now, the leaking of manuscripts and potential use of AI is hardening attitudes.
“We’re in such a precarious situation already,” said author Carmen Maria Machado, who was impersonated last month in an email her British publisher was savvy enough not to answer. “Why would you add to that in any capacity? It just makes no sense if you truly like books.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Miguel Salazar
Photographs by: Federico Ciamei and Peter Fisher
©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES
