Italian man pleads guilty to book fraud scheme in US court

Filippo Bernardini allegedly targetted high authors like Margaret Atwood, in addition to up-and-coming expertise in publishing.

Creator Margaret Atwood was among the many writers focused in a phishing scheme [Dylan Martinez/Reuters]

An Italian man accused of fraudulently acquiring greater than 1,000 guide manuscripts earlier than publication pleaded responsible earlier than a United States courtroom on Friday.

Filippo Bernardini, a 30-year-old publishing industry employee previously dwelling in London, faces one cost of wire fraud for engineering a multi-year scheme to focus on up-and-coming writers in addition to large names like Canada’s Margaret Atwood, creator of The Handmaid’s Story.

He faces as much as 20 years in jail for the scheme. At Friday’s listening to, Bernardini additionally agreed to pay $88,000 in restitution.

“Unpublished manuscripts are artistic endeavors to the writers who spend the time and vitality creating them,” stated Michael Driscoll, assistant director-in-charge of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York workplace.

“Mr Bernardini was allegedly attempting to steal different individuals’s literary concepts for himself, however in the long run, he wasn’t artistic sufficient to get away with it.”

Bernardini was arrested at New York’s John F Kennedy Worldwide Airport in January 2022. US Justice Division officers have accused him of impersonating editors, expertise brokers and different people to realize advance copies of unpublished books.

The scheme started round August 2016, investigators stated. Drawing on his information of the industry, Bernardini started to register upwards of 160 web domains that had names just like present publishing homes and literary scouts.

These domains, nonetheless, confirmed slight variations from the originals, prosecutors stated. The place an actual identify may embody the letter “m”, Bernardini would place a lowercase “r” and “n” shut collectively to imitate the letter’s form.

In a single case, the Justice Division stated he used one in all his ersatz electronic mail addresses to strategy a Pulitzer Prize-winning creator. Believing Bernardini to be their editor, the creator forwarded him a duplicate of a forthcoming manuscript.

One other tactic Bernardini allegedly deployed was a phishing scheme, the place he created a real-looking web site that prompted customers to offer their emails and passwords. Posing as a member of a talent-scouting firm, he emailed hyperlinks to this web site to 2 publishing-industry insiders.

The webpage, prosecutors stated, was designed to ship the confidential info to Bernardini’s electronic mail account.

Bernardini has not provided any motive for his alleged actions and has not tried to promote any of the guide manuscripts. Among the many authors caught up within the scheme have been US actor Ethan Hawke and British Booker Prize-winner Ian McEwan.

His sentencing listening to is ready for April 5 within the courtroom of US District Choose Colleen McMahon.

In an announcement on Friday, US District Legal professional for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams praised legislation enforcement and prosecutors for writing “the ultimate chapter to Bernardini’s manuscript theft scheme”.

“This real-life storyline now reads as a cautionary story,” Williams had stated beforehand, “with the plot twist of Bernardini dealing with federal legal prices for his misdeeds”.