As an indie author, one thing they always tell you is you need a mailing list. Marketing 101, get people to sign up and you can reach them directly with news of new releases, sales, special events, book signings, network television appearances and whatnot. And it makes total sense. Up to the point where most people will never sign up.
I don't get many mailing list subscribers. Subtract relatives, and the add rate is literally 1-2 folks per year. Given I rarely remember to ever send anything out to these faithful fans, this isn't a huge impediment to my success. That lies much further upstream.
Anyway, I get so few new adds to the list that when I get a notification email from MailChimp it comes as a genuine surprise every time.
Ooooooh.
Magic, innit? How exciting. A new subscriber!!!
But wait ...
Three subscribers? Pinch me. This is some big time stuff. This must be how Stephen King feels. I bet he still does a fist pump every time he gets one of these Mailchimp emails. I can just picture him running around his living room waving his arms, yelling, "Ka-chow, three new fans. Zoo-wee Mama!"
Who are my three new devotees?
Hmmm ... I don't recognize any of them. Nor any of these.
Yeah, they keep coming. But none of those names seem to include consonant-vowel patterns commonly found in North America. Not Eastern European, I'm pretty sure. Nor Asian.
What's that island that we slapped the tariffs on where only penguins live? Oh, yeah, there are two of them. The Heard and McDonald Islands.
What do the penguins there call themselves? Can they type well enough with their flippers to hit the right keys? Maybe their names are really Bob or Chilly Willy, but they just lack the dexterity to fill out forms on the internet.
I'm going to ride with that theory, because beyond bored penguins I can't find an angle here. What does anyone have to gain by signing up such obviously fake names to an email list? Particularly mine?
Online scams are as old as the interwebs, but most of the time you can at least suss out what the payoff might be. This one is a mystery. Either we're dealing with a master criminal playing 5D chess here, or someone's AI has gone very wonky.
Or these guys need a new hobby.
