Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Fellow authors, do you have a loved one who was a writer too, but sadly passed over into the Great Beyond with their poems or prose unpublished? Does the cosmic injustice of that weigh heavy on your soul? Do you lie awake nights, grieving that your loved one never had the chance to see his or her words enshrined in print?

Well, now there’s a way to set your troubled mind at rest, and give your loved one the recognition he or she deserved: Posthumous Vanity Publishing, a service run by one Dr. Edgar Scattergood.

Summer’s lease has far too short a date, but thousands of people of this World and the Next are published for Eternity with our Posthumous Vanity Publishing (PVP) services which you can access from your own home…Through our PVP services you can post your loved one’s prized creations to an all-accepting Universe, including poems, short stories, and novel excerpts. You’ll be amazed at the Reception.

Here’s a sample Posthumously Vanity Published website, complete with an introduction from Dr. Scattergood: The Hayfield Forever. And posthumous publishing services aren’t all Dr. Scattergood has to offer.

You may purchase an eGrave upon such eGrounds as the elite Whispering Dells or, in the medium price range, Harmony Glades. Funereal applications for iPhone and iPad are available. We also offer grexting (send text messages from your cell phone directly to your loved one’s eGrave), eUrns, eFlames, and all come with our trademarked eUlogies.

Right about now, you may be thinking something along the lines of Holy cow, the scams are getting weirder by the day! How do people get away with stuff like this? Or perhaps Could anyone really fall for such a scam? It reads like satire!

Bingo.

The PVP enterprise is actually a clever joke: an experimental fiction project created by real-life scam-buster Gary Rhoades, a Deputy City Attorney who works in the Santa Monica City Hall Consumer Protection Unit.

According to a 2009 article in the Santa Monica Daily Press,

The idea for the dark comedy came more than a year ago after Rhoades, who was curious from prosecuting a number of cases involving scam artists, decided to take on the mindset of such a criminal. An unpublished poet himself, Rhoades spent some time at a hay farm he owns in Missouri with [his brother] Alex to brainstorm a plot and figure out the best medium to tell the story.

They ended up creating four connected Web sites — www.foreverprized.com, www.thecartooncowgirlforever.com, www.seeminglyforever.com, and www.thehayfieldforever.com. The multiple Web sites are actually an attribute commonly found in scams, Rhoades said.

“Scam artists will create a cluster of Web sites that when people are going through them and clicking on the links, will go to another Web site and get this illusion of depth,” he said.

Also in on the joke is one of Rhoades’s colleagues, fellow Deputy City Attorney Barbara Greenstein, who plays the part of fictional Deputy District Attorney Carla Found, who is prosecuting scammer Scattergood for fraud.

The project was supposed to conclude in the fall of 2009, but seems to have taken on a life of its own, becoming an ongoing “experimental literary mystery,” with scammer Dr. Scattergood being just one story thread. There are now five interconnected websites–Forever Prized, Inc. (the PVP service itself), The Cartoon Cowgirl Forever (an “epic redemption poem”), Lucy Acre’s eGrave (with grexting functionality–for an extra fee, of course), Seemingly Forever (a posthumous hardboiled spy thriller), and the original posthumous “breached haiku,” The Hayfield Forever, complete with academic commentary–plus a Facebook page and Mr. Rhoades’s blog.

Quoted in 2009, Rhoades said he hadn’t heard from anyone who’d taken the websites seriously. “We hope that some of the over the top nature of some of the stuff clues them in…that this isn’t a real service.” But Rhoades’s knowledge of the inner workings of scams lends the websites a crazy surface credibility–and one of the reasons that writing scams are so ubiquitous is that so many people are inexperienced and unprepared,and don’t read carefully enough. I’d be willing to bet that by now, at least a few people have been fooled.