Filippo Bernardini pretended to be a prominent member of the publishing community to dupe people into turning over their work. A man from Italy has admitted to stealing over 1,000 unpublished manuscripts, many of which were written by well-known authors.
He made advantage of his insider knowledge of the business from his time working for Simon & Schuster, a major publisher in London.
Although Bernardini, 30, admitted to wire fraud in New York, his motivation was never explicit.
Neither manuscripts nor demands for ransom were discovered to have been leaked online.
The FBI detained Bernardini in January of last year, and his conviction looks to end a mystery that has perplexed the literary community for years, with novelists like Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and Sally Rooney among those targeted.
From 2016, according to the prosecution, he registered more than 160 phony internet domains.
To obtain manuscripts of books by authors including Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood, phishing scams using slightly altered official-looking email accounts were used to target agents, editors, and Booker Prize judges.
Atwood said there had been “concerted attempts to steal the manuscript” of her book The Testaments before it was published in a 2019 interview with The Bookseller.
She stated that numerous phony emails were sent by individuals attempting to obtain anything, including simply three pages.
It’s unclear what motivated the hoax, according to Daniel Sandström, editor of Swedish publisher Albert Bonniers Förlag, who was among the victims.
He said to the BBC that the literary answer to that issue was that “someone was doing it for the thrill of it and there’s a psychological conundrum at the core of this story.”
“A less romanticized response might be that… this was someone who wanted to feel important and pulling the strings, and that this was a technique in order to do that,” the author said.
Even though Bernardini was employed by Simon & Schuster, there was no indication that the publisher was at fault, and it was not mentioned in the court documents.
The publisher stated in a statement on Friday, “We are grateful to the FBI and Department of Justice for their defense and support of the intellectual property rights of authors throughout the world.
In April, Bernardini will receive his punishment. The maximum punishment for him is 20 years in prison.
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