The Radio Interview That Never Existed
At 1.18 this afternoon, an email arrived inviting me onto an American radio programme to discuss my book.
For a few happy minutes, I thought I had caught a break.
The message appeared to come from Paige Phelps, a senior producer at KERA 90.1 FM in Dallas. She sometimes presents Think, a nationally distributed programme featuring in-depth conversations with authors, journalists and academics.
The email invited me to take part in a remote interview lasting between 30 and 45 minutes. It identified my book by its full title, The GOOD Book: A Behavioural Operating System for Escaping Debt, and explained what had supposedly attracted the producer’s attention.
It was not simply the subject of debt. It was the idea of approaching debt through behaviour rather than concentrating exclusively on numbers and financial calculations.
The proposed conversation would explore the habits, decisions and patterns influencing how people spend, save and respond to financial pressure. We might discuss motivation, discipline, financial confidence and why knowing what we should do with our money does not always translate into doing it.
In other words, it appeared to understand the central argument of the book, and was precisely the kind of conversation I had hoped the book might eventually produce.
Why I Wanted to Believe It
The GOOD Book has not sold in significant numbers. That immediately made me wonder how a radio producer in Texas had discovered it.
Nevertheless, the invitation was not impossible.
I have recently published several articles that have reached audiences far beyond the usual readership of my website. My LinkedIn network has expanded, and more people have begun visiting The GOOD Method site. The book is publicly listed online, and its underlying argument is not restricted to Britain. The psychological relationship between behaviour and money is universal, even if many of the examples in the book are British.
Perhaps somebody really had found it.
The station existed. The presenter existed. The programme existed. Most importantly, the subjects described in the email were ones I could discuss confidently for 30 or 45 minutes.
Indeed, I was more concerned that my Liverpool accent might make me difficult for an American audience to understand!
That is what made the invitation effective. It did not ask me to believe something absurd. It presented me with something unlikely, but plausible.
It also offered something more powerful than money. It offered recognition.
Like many independent writers, I spend a considerable amount of time producing work that may only be read by a few hundred people. I believe in what I am writing, but it is difficult to know whether any of it will lead anywhere.
For a few minutes, the email appeared to say that somebody had noticed.
Then I Checked the Address
The message looked professional. It contained no suspicious link, attachment, demand for payment or obvious spelling mistakes.
The first warning appeared only when I expanded the sender’s details.
The email had not come from KERA’s domain. It had come from a Gmail address containing Paige Phelps’s name.
That was not in itself proof of fraud. People sometimes use personal email addresses, and it remained possible that a producer had contacted me outside the organisation’s normal system.
I did not respond immediately. The sender’s address was enough to make me pause. Instead, I used the contact information published on KERA’s official website to ask whether the invitation had really come from Paige.
The reply arrived quickly.
It had not.
Will the Real Paige Phelps Please Stand Up?
Paige confirmed that KERA and Think were being impersonated. She explained that the programme never asks guests to pay to appear and that the organisation was already aware of the problem.
She also told me that the impersonators apparently ask for $250 at the next stage.
That detail revealed how carefully the approach had been constructed.
The first email did not ask me for money because taking my money was not yet its purpose.
Its purpose was to gain my trust.
Had I replied, the supposed producer could have discussed my availability, offered a date and perhaps provided more information about the planned interview. With every exchange, I would have become more emotionally invested in the opportunity.
Only then would the $250 request arrive.
By that point, it might not look like the beginning of a scam. It might look like the final administrative requirement standing between me and a valuable opportunity.
The absence of an immediate demand for money was not evidence that the invitation was genuine. It was part of what made it convincing.
Scams No Longer Need to Look Ridiculous
We still tend to imagine fraudulent emails as badly written messages promising an unexpected inheritance or announcing that we have won a competition we never entered.
Those scams continue to exist, but they are not the only model.
A modern impersonation attempt can borrow the identity of a real person at a genuine organisation. It can collect information from a website, an online shop or a social-media profile. It can then use that information to construct an approach tailored to the person receiving it.
The National Cyber Security Centre warns that criminals use publicly available information, including material posted on social media, to make phishing messages more convincing.
In my case, everything required to create the invitation was publicly accessible:
my name and email address;
the title of my book;
its description and central argument;
my work as an author and writer;
my hope of reaching a larger audience.
The sender did not need to read the book. They only needed to understand what an independent author might want to hear.
Generative artificial intelligence has made creating this kind of message easier. I cannot prove that AI produced the invitation I received, but it would take very little effort to supply a book description to an AI system and ask it to produce a detailed invitation from a radio presenter.
Good grammar and relevant detail can no longer be treated as evidence that a message is genuine.
The Emotional Part of the Scam
Fraud is often discussed as though avoiding it is simply a test of intelligence.
That misses the point.
The strongest scams do not overcome our ability to think. They give us a reason not to examine something too closely.
A romance scam offers affection to someone who may be suffering from extreme loneliness. An investment scam offers financial security. A fraudulent job offer promises escape from unemployment or an unhappy workplace. This invitation offered the possibility that years of thought and work had finally been recognised, and that the ideas behind it might reach a much wider audience.
That does not mean the recipient is foolish. It means the approach has been designed around a genuine human need.
My first response was excitement. My second was curiosity. Suspicion came later.
Had the original email contained a request for $250, I would have dismissed it immediately. Instead, it allowed me to imagine the interview before revealing the price.
The emotional commitment was intended to precede the financial request.
Verification Does Not Mean Distrusting Everyone
The lesson is not that every unexpected opportunity should be treated as fraudulent.
If we assume that nobody is genuine, scammers will have damaged more than our bank accounts. They will have weakened our willingness to engage with other people at all. They will have weakened our humanity.
The answer is not automatic distrust. It is independent verification.
In this case, that meant:
examining the complete sender address;
checking the person’s actual position;
finding contact information through the organisation’s official website;
contacting the programme independently;
avoiding any links or contact details supplied by the original sender.
The National Cyber Security Centre recommends forwarding suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk, even when you are uncertain whether they are fraudulent. Reporting them may help protect somebody else from the same approach.
Most importantly, verification should happen before excitement becomes commitment.
Applying the Argument I Had Supposedly Been Invited to Discuss
There is an irony in this experience.
The fraudulent invitation asked me to discuss why knowing what we should do does not always translate into actually doing it.
To identify the deception, I had to apply the argument of the very book I had supposedly been invited to discuss.
I became aware of my emotional response. I paused before acting. I gathered better information. That information changed my behaviour and preserved my freedom to decide.
The message offered an immediate emotional reward: the feeling that my work had been noticed. Acting on that feeling without checking the evidence could eventually have cost me $250. My confidence would also have taken a considerable hit, because I would have berated myself for being taken in.
Instead, I contacted the real programme.
Paige encouraged me to share what happened and confirmed that I could identify and tag KERA when warning other writers and potential guests. I am grateful to her for replying so quickly and for helping turn a deeply disappointing experience into something useful.
For a few happy minutes, I genuinely thought I had caught a break.
I had not.
But perhaps telling the story will prevent somebody else from paying for an interview that never existed.
It is a sad world when so much of what appears to be real turns out not to be. We should not allow that to make us cynical about every opportunity.
We should simply remember that, online, even good news needs to prove who sent it.
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About the author
Paul Clark is the author of The GOOD Book: A Behavioural Operating System for Escaping Debt and Rebuilding Control and the creator of The GOOD Method. If you enjoyed this article, explore more of his writing in GOOD Thoughts, listen to The GOOD Conversation podcast, or join the GOOD Community to receive new articles, podcast episodes, resources and forthcoming videos by email. If there is a subject you would like Paul to investigate or write about, get in touch.