Hundreds of editors, authors, agents and literary scouts all over the world had already been duped into emailing hundreds of other advance manuscripts, generally in the form of PDF documents. Some had been strung along for years. Many put it down to the work of a gang of manuscript thieves, operating with considerable success since 2016, via identity-theft scams of ratcheting elaboration.

In technological terms, the modus operandi was hardly sophisticated. The thieves emailed from a roster of lookalike domain names that closely resembled those of high-profile literary businesses – penguinrandornhouse or macrnillan, with ‘rn’ instead of ‘m’; ‘wylieaqency’; substituting a country identifier such as ‘.it’ or ‘.se’ with ‘.com’ or vice versa. It’s a frequent ruse in cyber crime, known as ‘domain typo squatting’. 

Detecting these micro inconsistencies on a screen demands close scrutiny. (When the book industry’s amateur detectives delved into the bogus domains, they found they were registered to random addresses and phone numbers across the world: an H&M in Copenhagen, a health clinic in London, a New York housing development.)

But the dark brilliance of the scheme really lay in the perpetrators’ plausibility. Whether posing as a Penguin Random House editor, or a Wylie Agency foreign rights manager, or a top literary scout, they seemed to know exactly who knew who, and who knew what: the publishing jargon, the news and gossip. 

‘They know who our clients are, they know how we interact with our clients, where sub-agents fit in and where primary agents fit in,’ said Catherine Eccles, owner of the London-based EcclesFisher literary scouting agency last year. ‘They’re very, very good.’

In fact, the culprits were able to mimic the email personalities of individuals across the full spectrum of publishing, from big players to junior assistants, and in a broad swathe of languages: Danish, Swedish, Korean, Spanish… They were breezy, polite, empathetic or cheekily waspish as required. 

‘So much of it was just chitchat,’ says Laurence Laluyaux, foreign rights director at RCW, one of the UK’s leading literary agencies. ‘Sort of “Hope you’re well, I’m finding it really hard to juggle kids and work in the pandemic.”’ Email greetings and sign-offs were pitch perfect, with only the rarest slip-up (an assistant at US super agency WME deduced that an email purportedly from her blunt boss was bogus when she saw it included the words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’).

But perhaps the most unsettling part of the mystery was the absence of any traditional motive. No ransoms were demanded. Not one PDF was leaked as a spoiler: the stolen manuscripts simply vanished into a phantom inbox.