I am the sort of person who makes scammers’ lives worthwhile. I’ve been done by all of them: fake banks, fake charities, fake relatives, even a fake tree surgeon. Never thought I’d get done by a fake book.

But I was looking at the bestseller list on Sunday and noticed one called Tart by “Slutty Cheff”. I’d never heard of it, or her, but she sounded like my sort of gal. And also she was a chef. “An anonymous London chef,” to be precise, “who knows what it’s really like to work in the capital’s hectic restaurant scene.” So, just in case she had anything to say that I didn’t know already, I grabbed my Kindle, poked up the shopping page and typed “slutty cheff”.

The first thing it offered was “slutty chef yes please daddy sex costume £9.99”, which was an odd offer to see on a reading device and not what I was looking for at all. Although I did buy one, because you never know.

Then it offered Slutty Chef — The Untold Story of an Anonymous London-based Chef and Food Writer, so I bought that too. For £8.99. I didn’t notice that it wasn’t called Tart. Nor did I mind much that it was bylined “John Snow”. I just assumed that was a bland copyright name they use when the author is anonymous. Then I flicked past the contents pages to the start and found, weirdly, that I was already 12 per cent in. Then I noticed it was all in the third person, very repetitive, mostly speculating about what might be in Tart, and read like AI copy. Then it ended, 3,000 words at most. Many of them the same.

So I googled “John Snow Slutty Cheff author” and he doesn’t exist. Although the book does. It comes up on Amazon just below Tart (which hadn’t come up on Kindle at all), and you can even buy it in paperback for £16.99. All 55 pages of it. Which I imagine are computer chunked on demand. It also exists on goodreads.com, which has the author as “John Snow, 1813-1858, English physician who was a leader in the development of anaesthesia”.

My “Slutty Cheff” book, then, is AI-generated (very lazily), entirely piratical and had been “published” four days after Tart, to do exactly what it did, which is trap sorry old fools into buying it by mistake. Although who is to say the real thing isn’t AI-generated too, and equally rubbish? I’m definitely not buying two books in one week about a slutty chef, so I’ll never know.

Which means, in the end, that it’s the “real” Slutty C who’s been conned, whoever she is, not me. I think she should have a word with Amazon; they famously care deeply about rights and fairness and all that stuff.

Royal with cheese

Staying with food sluttery, there was a story at the weekend that Prince George, super-yachting poshly around the Greek islands with his family, had a boat sent ashore at Zakynthos for, said a source, “a specific dietary item … Nothing extravagant, just something particular”. And Zakynthos being one of the only islands with a McDonald’s, people quickly surmised that our future king had sent for a burger.

For which I applaud him. In a week when his great-uncle Andy was castigated for calling a senior staff member “a f***ing imbecile”, George’s behaviour struck me as properly princely. After all, we all get fed up with the endless calamari and taramasalata in Greece, until we think if we see another goddam olive we’ll flip. But it takes true authority to stand up and cry: “For the love of God, somebody get me a Big Mac!”

Saw you coming

Returning to con tricks, what lunacy to recompense people who bought a car on finance. Who but a fool ever did that? Who does not see the preposterous interest rates offered and impenetrable Ts&Cs and think, “Hang on, these bandits are trying to trick me into buying a car I can’t afford”? No sympathy at all.

Those suckers were asking to be robbed and duly were. For further details, buy my new book, Your Car Finance and the Law. It’s £8.99 on Amazon. Honest.