For whatever reason, the early-2000s are experiencing a revival in pop culture. Despite being a decade marred by terrorist attacks, wars, a shuttle disaster, and a massive financial collapse, I guess the wacky clothes, music, and poorly rendered polygons of the Nintendo GameCube make up for all the abject horrors that defined my adolescence and university years. Who am I to judge? After all, I’m not that big a fan of the ‘80s despite having been there. No matter, all this reminiscing of the dawn of the 21st century makes me feel that it is appropriate to go back and discuss that time when I was the victim of a literature scam.
While a junior in high school, I created an account on Fictionpress to share my poetry and short stories with the world. They were garbage, but to my young ego having a following of nearly fifty people in a rather short period of time was a good dopamine hit. This had even managed to transcend into the real world when a nurse, who was working with my grandfather’s primary care provider, happened to notice that he had the same surname as the author she had been reading online, and he and my grandmother were both proud to say that their grandson was said writer. Mmm, brain chemicals!
This was an era before ad blockers, and the Internet was plagued with animated banners promising a new ringtone if you could click the dancing cartoon man to shave his mullet, or wildly flashing ads for online casinos that were in no way operating within the United States (or legally).
Other ads were far more insidious and attempted to blend in with the legitimate website you were currently using. One such ad appeared on Fictionpress announcing a nationwide poetry contest. Given my positive experience and naivety with the online world at this point, I decided to enter a song I had written for the band that my sister and I had recently formed.
Then the bullshit started.
I will refer to this sham as The Society of Infamous Poets. While the group is defunct, and despite that it had been openly referred to in print media as a scam as early as 2001, I do not want to summon the wrath of the conman who ran this thing if he’s desperate for some money that he can attempt to gain in a frivolous lawsuit. If he’s even alive anymore.
The warning signs that something was off were abundant. First, despite having been a finalist and receiving the prize of having my work put in print for making it that far, I was only able to receive the book in which I was being published if I paid for it in advance. Second, though the first letter telling me of my placement in the finals claimed that an upcoming Infamous Poets symposium would be held in Philadelphia, the second package containing all of the relevant information pertaining to both the book and the in-person event now stated that symposium was held in Reno, Nevada (I had no plans on attending regardless). Third, all of the other accolades that I was being told that I had “won” were only available, much like the book, after paying for them.
My parents were so excited by all of this that they never really questioned the rather strange prerequisite of money. I was nearly finished with high school and was planning on majoring in professional writing; having been published before college had even begun would look great not only for admissions, but also for prospective employers after I had graduated. They happily paid over $150.00 for the book (of which they purchased two) alongside a few other features such as a dedication, a short biography, and a headshot. I also had to resubmit the song for it to appear in the book (I thought I had placed and was already in the book?) and pay one dollar for every line that ran over the 21-line limit. Note: I had beaten this line requirement in the “contest” phase by extending some of them and had wanted my song to appear correctly in print.
The books finally arrived a year and a half later and looked as though they had been crafted in someone’s garage. The binding was extremely crude and basic, the interior pages were very thin and fragile (read: cheap), and from pages 11 to 100 the text was faded and unreadable, as though it had been made with a home computer and printer that was in need of new ink cartridges. It was a mess:
Those books sat in my parents’ house for a little while before I started doing some research into Infamous Poets. I had read a blog by another young writer who had been duped into spending hundreds of dollars in a very similar sounding contest. I felt a little sick to my stomach, and upon visiting the site that had scammed the blogger, I felt my face and hands go numb as I came to the realization that they were the same people. They had the same banner showcasing the same “winners,” the same caricature of Shakespeare adorning the page, the same logo, the same rules for the same contest. The only difference was that this incarnation was called “Infamous Poets of Hollywood.”
Looking deeper, there were other versions targeting writers in the Midwest such as Infamous Christian Poets, and another along the lines of We’ll Be Your Friends Poets (again, I’m altering these names ever so slightly). These all had different domains, but were the same website as The Society of Infamous Poets. Each showcased the same blonde woman as their “publisher” with a fictitious name similar to Floral Borealis. (I could easily use her “real name” because she doesn’t exist, but again, I don’t really want to risk it.) The photo of Floral displayed on the Infamous Poets website was obviously a picture that had come from inside of a frame found at a KMart by the man behind the scam. You could still see traces of the decorative border after he had swiftly cropped it in Microsoft Paint or something similar. That he didn't just scan the stock image and chose to photograph it on an early 2000s digital camera or cellphone means he didn't even bother to purchase the damn frame. Probably used up all his money on that beautiful printing quality!
After I had calmed down, I notified my folks that we had all been the victims of a scam and proceeded to go into every tiny detail. They were disappointed to say the least. I was livid that they had lost over one hundred dollars to a sleazy schmuck promising rainbows out of both his ass and his single room office in the middle of farmland Oregon (I looked up their physical address on MapQuest, again this was a while ago), and that he was still operating using several websites and false identities to capture as many amateur writers as he could.
Despite it being a couple years later, I thought I would try contacting the Better Business Bureau regarding this matter in the hopes that my parents’ money could be recovered and the scammer brought to justice. I never heard back. I decided to take matters into my own hands at this point.
I posted every detail to my comedy blog in the autumn of 2007, included the image of the poorly printed book seen here, and warned everyone to avoid this contest by its real name. I even shared the post in my college class on writing for the Web, and my professor shared it with every one of her writing classes. Soon the entire campus was aware of Infamous Poets. Then I started getting comments from predominantly young authors in their teens who were just minutes away from entering the contest, had doubts about its legitimacy, found my post and were writing in to thank me for the warning. The emails were even more frequent, so much so that I had to set up a Gmail account under my comedy persona’s name just to handle the volume.
To demonstrate that the entire writing challenge was fraudulent, I got together with some friends and we all wrote the worst poetry imaginable and entered our concoctions into the Society of Infamous Poets website. Within a few months, we each received a letter stating that we were chosen out of thousands of submissions to be finalists in their contest. Here is one of the creations from that evening:
Red in the colour of the apple I go to reach for it. It shines in the summer sun. My hand explodes- it was really a stick of dynamite. I like red. And dinosaurs.
I guess they know a winning poem when they see one! Our junk entries and their respective telegrams alerting us to our high placing statuses were all posted in an update to my page.
It was around this time that I started to receive aggressive messages from an individual calling himself, oh, I’ll say Marcel. This was yet another alias along with Floral Borealis. According to public information regarding the ownership of the scam’s many websites, they were all registered and owned by a guy whom I’ll call Big Johnny. Articles appearing in The Boston Phoenix dating from 2001 openly called Big J the “granddaddy of dodgy poetry contests” and state that he had been pulling this scam in some form or fashion since the 1980s. Marcel was just a name he had whipped up to make it sound as though he had actual employees running his many websites and contests. Rather than check to make sure his home printers had enough ink to make those shitty books, he had to waste countless hours trashing my old site. What a loser!
At first, he filled the comments section with links to photos of “real winners” of the Infamous Poets contest and desperately attempted to sell himself as a legitimate publisher. The latter being hard to do when Floral was always credited as the publisher. Then he began to reply to each entry in the conversation before finally using the comments function to make various threats towards my readers and myself. These increasingly strange remarks escalated into emails from Marcel’s official Society of Infamous Poets address, alongside several sock-puppet accounts, each saying the same sort of thing: that I’m the bad guy and he’ll make sure I never write again, I’m bad mouthing a wonderful contest, etc.
Marcel/Big Johnny practically lived in the discussions for around eight or nine months. Even with new articles coming out where I reviewed strange movies I had picked up in the bargain bin at a local Walmart, nearly all of the notifications I received in this time revolved around the poetry post. I guess it isn’t that hard to run a sham literary contest and half-assed publishing service if he was able to dedicate so much time to one little column on a page with nearly one hundred total entries. As my site was a subdomain for a then popular blogging service, I reached out to the host to see if it would be possible to have his IP address permanently blocked, but I never received anything conclusive. It seemed that he tuckered himself out by the summer of 2008, before any further action was warranted on my part.
Infamous Poets, along with its alternative titles, abruptly stopped all operations in 2015. Searching for the original page outside of the Internet Archive only yields results referring to poets such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare and other faces from your high school English textbooks. We’ll probably never know just how many people were ultimately victims of Big Johnny throughout his long running racket, or how much money he was able to con from aspiring writers (the 2001 article claimed tens of millions and it was still running for another fourteen years). This filthy, smelly scam’s demise likely came about in part due to more accessible self-publication tools, savvier Internet users more aware of deceptions, and the use of social media to share original work over actual criminal justice.
It is fun, however, to think that a little post by a weirdo in university who often wore an historically inaccurate horned Viking helmet to class, could also have contributed to its demise, even if it were just a tiny bit.