A man from Italy has admitted to stealing over 1,000 unpublished manuscripts, many of which were written by well-known authors. Filippo Bernardini pretended to be prominent members of the publishing community to dupe people into turning over their work.

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 made 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 put an end to 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 phoney internet domains.

In order 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.

“There were lots of phoney emails from people trying to winkle even just three pages, even just anything,” she noted.

Daniel Sandström, editor of Swedish publisher Albert Bonniers Förlag, who was among those targeted, said it was difficult to know what the motivation for the scam was.

“The literary answer to that question, I think, I mean somebody was doing it for the thrill of it and there’s a psychological enigma at the bottom of this story,” he told the BBC.

“A less romanticised answer would be that… this was somebody who liked to feel important and pulling strings, and that this was a trick in order to achieve that.”

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