Step into Lightfield Living at the Express by folding doors Milton Keane's showroom and experience products that seamlessly connect your home's interior and exterior. From by folding and sliding doors to windows, entrance doors and glass roofs, all built and installed by Express. Whether renovating, extending, or building new, see the quality for yourself at our stunning showroom or visit expressbyfolds.co.uk. Every case file, interview, and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lo and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retail crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime story telling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. Most anyone who's published stories online or in print, and especially anyone who has self-published, has gotten calls or emails like the ones a guy named Kevin Detler started getting a few years back. Kevin, now in his very early 70s, but at that point in his late 60s, is a soybean farmer from South Dakota who loves to hunt. If it walks in North America and can be hunted, Kevin has almost certainly shot it. And if it was magnificent enough, he also probably had it stuffed and mounted and put on display in a restaurant he used to own. It's called appropriately Trophie's Steakhouse. Truth is, Kevin loved to talk about hunting and stuffing critters so much that he self-published a book in 2012 called Hunting. You've got to be kidding, which he describes in his own promotional copy as a humorous and emotional story of his endeavor to achieve what only 120 hunters in the world had accomplished. In the harsh Arctic wilderness, one man begins on a quest beyond hunting to complete the North American 29. That being a successful kill of all 29 big game species in North America, also known as the Super Slam. That number as of late 2025 was actually 272 hunters. And the list of 29, if you're curious, like me, includes five types of deer, four kinds of bear, four varieties of sheep, three elk, three mousse, plus cougar, bison, muscox, mountain goat, and pronghorn. But as Kevin soon discovers, the path to the North American 29 is brought with peril. From the rugged mountains of Wyoming to the dense forests of Quebec Labrador, Kevin's quest takes him to the farthest corners of the continent. With each successful hunt, Kevin draws closer to his soul, fueled by a passion that knows no bounds in a faith that keeps him grounded. To publish this account, Kevin worked with a company called Letra Press that collected many, many fees for editing and, in theory, helping to place and sell Kevin's book. Mostly though, Letra just disappointed him. He didn't feel like he'd gotten his money's worth. Then, in 2020, eight years after Kevin's book was first on shelves, which is to say, mostly not on shelves at all, his old agent from Letra, Tim Nola, reached back out. Tim was excited to share that he was now working for a new publishing company, called Page Turner, and couldn't get Kevin's hunting opus out of his mind. It was one of the best self-published books he'd ever worked on, he said, so good that he wanted to work with Kevin to get it published for real by one of the major publishers. Also, he said he was no longer going by Tim Nola. He was now Ray Ross. Tim's slash Ray proceeded to charge for a whole array of perfectly legal services. Ten grand here, fifteen grand there, and Kevin was frankly getting a little sick of it, since none of it resulted in a deal with a major publisher, or really any noticeable benefit at all. Then, more than a year, and well into six figures of personal investment later, Kevin got some great news. A film company affiliated with Page Turner wanted the rights to his book to make a Netflix series. They were willing to pay him more than one million dollars. Kevin obviously is overjoyed, he gets a contract, and there's all these stipulations in the contract that say in order to go through with this deal, you have to have a screenplay developed. As in, you need to pay someone to write it. That'll run you a hundred grand. You have to sell so many books, which means you have to pay for marketing, and the list just goes on and on of all these services that he has to pay for in order for Netflix to make his book into a series. This is Brent Crane, by the way. He's an investigative journalist based in San Diego. The same city where Tim slash Ray claimed to be living. Brent reported on Kevin and this story for Bloomberg Business Week in the summer of 2025. If you're wondering why Kevin didn't see through it, part of it was desire. When you want something badly enough, you're willing to ignore a lot of warning signs. But also, this wasn't some hacky scam. Ray and the various parties he claimed to be working with concocted a convincing facade, deal memos, websites, lengthy contracts that arrived via a docu-sign, detailed budgets. It all looked extremely legit. This goes on over like two years or so. And after all of it, nothing has moved forward with this supposed, and that flex deal and he's out of $500,000 plus. You heard that correctly. A half million dollars of Kevin's own money sunk into this dream. So, yeah, I really just sort of almost ruined his entire livelihood. Which is sad and sort of astounding, probably, if you're one of those people who's never cared to write a book. But if you have, I think you might get it. I certainly do. This is Camillean, the weekly show about people who pretend to be something they aren't. And I'm Josh D. This week, a publishing scam that hits a little too close to home. The story of Paige Turner and the vultures who prey on ambitious after the break. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons, designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck Now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Camillean Weekly. Books have an almost mystical power over us, me as much as anyone. I was a writer first. I still am. In addition to making podcasts, I've published two books with another one on the way this year. So I get it. Having a book published just feels like an accomplishment. It's validating creatively in a way few things are. But I can also tell you it's been a journey. A journey that has not made me rich. Still, it's a dream a lot of people have. One of the things I hear most often after telling people I'm a writer is that they too have a book idea. What I like to hear about it. And while the traditional publishing market remains hard to penetrate, a sort of shadow publishing industry, a mostly legal but often shady alternative path has sprung up and thrived. The blanket term is self publishing. But this large and growing niche, it contains multitudes and it has no lack of customers. I think a lot of amateur writers just think their way better than they are. And they are very confident that their book is the next Harry Potter or something like that. And if only if it could get better marketing, if only it could get more readers, people would recognize their talent. There are lots and lots and lots of people out there like that. Last year, more than two million books were self published in the US alone. Up from just a few hundred thousand a decade ago, though self publishing, paying to have your book printed and sold, goes back a long way like many, many decades, the industry has absolutely exploded in the internet era. For writers who can't or don't want to navigate the traditional publishing world, self publishing feels like a lifeline, a clear path to achieving this enormous goal, a bucket list item in many cases. And so, of course, it makes sense that there's a shady side of the industry. Companies like Page Turner are selling a dream. They're capitalizing on people's belief in themselves. That is really the emotional vulnerability that these scammers target. And they really explored it quite successfully. He's not kidding. Kevin's story, as horrible as it is, may not even be the worst of it. I heard rumors of people losing a million dollars, the Page Turner. But that kind of scamming prowess, if true, might explain why this company of all the questionable self publishing outfits out there hit the Department of Justice's radar. Because in January 2025, three of the people running Page Turner, which turned out to be based in Saboo, a city in the Philippines, were arrested following an indictment by the US attorney for the Southern District of California. The suspects arrested were Michael Chris Tria Sordia and Brian Navales Teroza, both of the Philippines, plus Gemma Tria Austin, who was the registered agent for Page Turner in the US, as well as Sordia's aunt. The indictment alleged that over a seven-year period starting in September 2017, the defendant's quote, used Page Turner to operate a book publishing scam in which the conspirators contacted individual authors through unsolicited calls and emails. As part of the conspiracy, the scammers falsely told victims their works had been selected for acquisition by publishers or movie studios, and fraudulently convinced victims to send payments for various services. Before the victim author's work could be published or optioned to studios. What started with the promise of a Hollywood dream turned into a devastating nightmare for victims, said US attorney Teremma Graff. Author should stay vigilant, do their research, and think twice before giving money to anyone promising a blockbuster deal. If you or anyone you know has been targeted in a similar scheme, please report it to the FBI immediately. According to the DOJ, the FBI identified more than 800 victims of the scheme, who collectively lost more than $44 million. But the half a dozen former Page Turner employees I interviewed, they all thought that was a significant undercount. Either way, the scale of it was pretty stunning. But a loud Page Turner to not just exist, but also to thrive, is the ethical gray area where a lot of self-publishers live. The basic idea of paying a company to publish your book and paying more to market it, that's totally legal. But it's also often scammy feeling. As the director of the Alliance of Independent Authors told Brent Crane for his story, almost by definition, people in that space have been bad actors because they are posing as publishers and pretending to be something they aren't. There's also complaints that these companies have predatory practices where they just hound writers and upsell them. And that's really the nucleus of what these scam companies have built themselves off of. Is this legitimate industry of self-publishing? The author's guild has a whole section of its website to warn writers about self-publishers. And as this high-level advice, the first rule of thumb is that if someone solicits you out of the blue with an offer that seems too good to be true, it probably is. I should say, the core idea here isn't new at all. Victoria Strauss has been writing the blog writer-Boware to warn authors about literary scams and schemes since the late 1990s when the internet was young and primitive. But it's gotten way worse in recent years. I started seeing all these awful stories of feature, literary agents and scammy editors and vanity publishers. And it was like this whole underbelly of the publishing industry that I had no idea existed. Just to say, Victoria suffers from spasmotic dysphonia. That's the same neurological disorder RFK junior has. And it affects her voice. Before self-publishing became such a big thing, there was a point where actually incompetence was more problem and deliberate fraud. Agents coming into the business with no relevant professional background or publishers had started up. People with no experience in publishing and that's still a danger for writers. But the days when incompetence was the thing you mostly had to watch out for are gone. And now it's absolutely scammy fraud. Victoria says this industry or whatever it is is gigantic. She was not surprised at all to hear that Page Turner was based in the Philippines, which turns out to be a nexus for predatory outfits. What's happening in the Philippines without fits like Page Turner Victoria says is a very specific and lucrative niche. The Philippines scams really just stick to publishing-related scams. They focus almost exclusively on people who have already self-published as opposed to soliciting people who have manuscript and want to self-publish. Similar scams exist in all the creative industries, but for whatever reason there are just vastly more aspiring writers than as aspiring artists or aspiring musicians. And it's just a huge pool that just never seems to, I mean you can't tap that out. The Philippines of it all, that's one thing that Drew Brent cramed at this story in the first place. He was fascinated to learn that Saboo in particular was a sort of hub. And there's a reason. There's dozens and dozens of companies that are doing this, but most of them seem to be owned by this one company called Author Solutions, which is this sort of multi-billion dollar company now owned by a private equity company. Author Solutions is based in the US, but the company has long outsourced most of its operations to Saboo City. There's been two cross-action lawsuits against author solutions in the last like 10 or 15 years. One was dismissed, the other was settled out of court. So a lot of writers complain that what author solutions is somehow illegal. But no judge is yet to declare any of the activity illegal. It seems that Page Turner on the other hand decided to just leap right over that murky ethical into outright fraud. More after the break. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck. I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be deltoned? Listen to The Deck now wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Camille. Page Turner was founded in 2017 by Michael Sordia, one of those two men arrested in January of 2025. Sordia grew up in a poor, fatherless household in Saboo City. In interviews, he has described himself as a hustler, working various angles to make money. In his early 20s, he landed a job at ex-leabress, an imprint of author solutions. It was there that he learned the ropes of the author's services industry. He must have just thought, you know, I can just do this myself without any of the guardrails. And that's what he does. He sets up this company. He actually calls the company Innocentrics. And he advertises it as a mainstream outsourcing company. One skamer who says he quit because he just felt like so guilty and about it. He told me that Mike directed him to like get creative. That was the words he used when he talked about having to hit, you know, like crazy high quotas. Because all the all the skammers would have these quotas they had to hit for how much money they were bringing in. Soon enough, Mike was raking in cash and loving life. He diversifies his portfolio. He buys, among other things, a beauty pageant, a construction company, a coffee chain, even a whole beach resort. He's spending a lot of money and he's also hiring a lot of employees and he's taking them on these like, you know, wolf of Wall Street-esque party trips on yachts and renting ballrooms in luxury hotels for like these big gallows. And this is how he ends up on the DOJ's radar. He's just taken too much money from too many victims like Kevin Detler. Mike Sedelia had an aunt here in San Diego who was the registered agent for Page Trainer in America because Page Trainer would tell all of its victims that they were based in San Diego and they'd registered the company here. So in December of 2024, Mike Sedelia and his business slash romantic partner, Brian Tarrosa, they traveled to San Diego to meet with his aunt and that's when the FBI has swobin in arrest. So if he hadn't come to America, I mean he very well likely would have just continued all in the scam. Because a US indictment carries no weight in the Philippines, Mike and his associates could well have just kept at it. Authorities back home seemed to simply not care. In Sabu, Sedelia's family, they had this press conference with this spokesman and they claimed that Sedelia and Tarrosa completely deny everything and they're blaming all the scamming on rogue sales agents. Brent knew that he couldn't unravel the story of Page Trainer as the most brazen of fraudulent self-publishers without going to Sabu City to try and see this scamming industry up close. But he also didn't want to just parachute in. He needed sources, at least one, who could take him behind the curtain. But he was struggling to get anyone to talk. I'm most unfaithful because Facebook looks like super popular in the Philippines. I had spoken to one guy named Mike Gorn before I got there. He had scanned another victim who I spoke to. So that's how I learned of him. And I reached out to him on Facebook and to my surprise, he responded to me and said he was open to speaking. And he was just very open and frank about his scamming in a way that I just found very suspect. As a journalist, we're always trying to figure out what someone's motive for speaking with me. It's just very important because it colors everything of what they're saying. He said he was emotionally conflicted about having scanned for Page Trainer. But the tone of his voice, it was just very clear that wasn't the case. They talked first by phone before Brent left California. And Mike was surprisingly open about the idea that he'd ripped people off at Page Trainer's direction. I told him up front, you know, I can't pay you for your time. But right after the interview, he messages me and he says, Hey, can you like pay pal me $25 for my wife's birthday or something? So let me just say this in auspicious start. Brent made it to Subu just fine. He hired a local fixer named Max to help him navigate the reporting on the ground as an American journalist who doesn't speak the local language. And the two men arranged a meeting with Mike Gorn, the self-proclaimed scammer at a local Starbucks. He's just like just very big sort of guy with a bunch of tattoos on his arm, you know, shaved head, he kind of looks like a sumo wrestler. He's wearing like dark sunglasses, you know, white polo shirt. He sort of waddles in the Starbucks. I can just see like this pleasure flicker across his eyes when he sees that I haven't come alone. Still, Mike said down at his table and the interview proceeded. It's much like the initial phone interview where he's just like very frank about a scam and he's reciting the spills is what they called him, which is like the sort of ruse that they use to hook riders. It truly is a ruse. Salesmanship that's just oozing with lies. Oh, hi, Linda. I love your book. You know, I used to represent JK Rowling and I really think you have great potential. It's just clear that he's getting such pleasure out of recounting these stories. This was gold for Brent story, but there's one part of it. He just couldn't figure out. And again, I'm asking, you know, why are you talking with me? And then he started, comes up with another reason he said, well, I thought maybe you could tell me if Mike Sardelia had implicated me in the trial in America. And I tell him, well, the trial hasn't even started yet. So that's sort of a moot point. The situation in that Starbucks began to get tense. I should say also during the interview, this other big guy comes into the Starbucks and sits down at the table like right next to us and he just stares out into space and like doesn't order anything. And it's just very clear. He's like, he's dropping on us. Eventually, Brent just points him out. Who is this dude? He's my driver, Mike says. And things didn't get any less shady from there. At the end of the interview, Mike Goren lets it be known that he has this cache of documents that he said he had pilfered from page turner that he's happy to provide to me. But of course, he can't email them. He has to deliver it in person. And so a couple days later, they met again. Mike shows up literally two hours late to the interview. Me and Max are just sitting in this cafe waiting for him. And he's like, I'm on my way a little bit of a way. He shows up. He doesn't have the documents. And he says, oh, the driver's on his way. The alarm bells are just going off my head this whole time. I was saying, we really should probably leave. This doesn't feel right. Because Mike, during this time, he keeps getting up and like leaving and coming back and saying, oh, I think the driver might be here. And then he would like come back and back. Oh, he's done here. Yeah. At one point, Mike's gone for like 20 minutes or something. And then Mike returns. And he says, the driver's here, but he's at this other cafe. I'm the other side of the mall. So we have to go walk and find him. And me and Max sit down in the cafe. And as we're sitting there, a young couple walks into the cafe, sits at the table right next to us and doesn't order anything. Don't speak just sort of stare at each other. Immediately, I'm like, these guys are with Mike. Mike comes back into the cafe. And he just looks furious. He starts ignoring me and starts speaking to my fixer. And he says, do you really know this guy? Like, I don't trust him. And so I'm like, Mike, what's the problem? What's going on? And Mike just looks at me and his eyes are just like bulging. And he's like, I don't like how you're treating me. I can't even explain to you how to strut. He looks. He is look so pained. You know, I got me. I can't believe how you don't trust me. I'm just trying to help you. Apparently the driver has arrived. So he's pointing at the driver. We're in this courtyard. And he's like, just comes to the driver. He has the documents. I am convinced that I'm being scanned. Now I'm walking into a trap. I can't probably within like, you know, 10 feet of this driver. And he's wearing sunglasses as a flat-brim hat, you know, really scraggly beard, like just very skinny. And he's like holding this Manila folder. Mike Gordon had told me that, you know, the documents were like 60 plus pages, right? So you'd expect like a thick folder. Clearly nothing in the folder. And that for me was like the absolute end all. I say to Max, I'm like, we're leaving. Like, you know, we really need to leave now. I start walking away at a pretty fast pace, like almost running. And Mike Gordon just rubs and just starts like screaming curses at me. And yeah, just sort of that sets off this like low speed chase through the mall. I mean, Max are sort of making our way through the car park. And Mike Gordon is just berating us. Screaming sort of, you need to pay the driver. Slash, you need to pay me like he sort of shows back and forth. He kind of can't keep his like, scam lies straight. And he's screaming in English and then like the local language, Messiah. And all these like arm security guards in the mall are doing nothing. I'm screaming back at him. He's screaming at me. It's like it's a scene, right? Like everyone in the mall is looking. I could have easily outrun him, right? But Max says it's like bad legs. So he had to limp. So I'm like, 10 or 12 feet ahead of Max. Like not running, but not walking either because I don't want to leave Max there with this guy. And we get to the car and Mike comes to the passenger door side and just, you know, I'm trying to close the door and he won't let me close it. And he's got his like huge arm like thrown in the door, you know. Max like pulls out money and sort of like throwing it at him, you know, like a few bills. Yeah, as in this wall. I'm grabbing his arm. I'm trying to like price fingers off the door, starting to close the door. And I'm just praying that he doesn't pull out a weapon. You right? Like if he pulls out a gun or a knife, like I don't know what happens there. Finally, Max does like pull out properly of the parking space and like, you know, kicks it out. And Mike is forced to pull his arm out of the the car. But you know, before he does that, he says, Brent, I'll find you. I'm going to send people to the airport. You know, I'll fucking kill you. So yeah, I'm properly spooked. I've never done this before. I shut them to the airport with no ticket. I lost that night. First flight to Hong Kong. I could buy. The question Brent had is the same question I had. What did Mike actually want here? My sense was that he was going to use these terror tactics, which is what another victim of his described them to me as to, you know, bring me to an ATM and just basically force me to take out as much money as I could believe it or not. This encounter at the mall wasn't the end of it. Mike Gorn was committed to the bit. One of the first things I did was block his Facebook. But I got another Facebook message from someone purporting to be his wife, which is probably just like him on another Facebook account. It had photos of him claiming that he had broken his arm and like the whole car thing. And that I needed to send money for his medical care. I've got to say part of me respects the hustle, but a much bigger part of me thinks that this points to a real darkness behind the whole page turner operation. There's part of you that thinks it's like books, right? Like it's literary bookworm stuff. Like they can't be that bad these scammers, but they totally are. I mean, they're violent criminals like any other sort of criminal gang that's taking in millions of dollars. That's really what I learned from that experience. Here's the thing about the page turner bust. Three alleged criminals who preyed on ambition and took money from people who mostly couldn't afford to lose it were stopped at least temporarily. And maybe they'll stop scamming. But the larger trend here, it's definitely not stopping. Scamming in the internet era is just too easy. You can talk to anyone anywhere from your home computer. And because many of the worst offenders are based abroad in very far flung places, there's very little the FBI can actually do. Which is why Victoria Strauss, who's been trying to warn authors for a quarter century feels a little defeated. When we got all of this started, we really thought that we could put ourselves out of business because we would just put out some anymore names and we would educate so many people. We wouldn't be needed anymore, but I have to say it's worse now than it ever has been in, you know, 25 years of tracking scams. It's just awful out there. Still she says page turner really stands out. So egregious, so greedy, so incredibly convoluted with these fake movie studios and fake organizations they created and all of the stuff that they did and the amounts of money that they took because there are a lot of scams that are pretty bad, but page turner is the only one that I know of it has taken, you know, in excess of $300,000 from anyone person. So I think the greediness and the sheer number of people that they targeted, it broke through the kind of barriers that keep these scams kind of under the radar because people reached out to the FBI, you know, in scams and the amounts were significant enough and the scams were egregious enough that the FBI took notice and actually investigated. I mean, it's a paper-train scam. They draw you in, you know, they boil you like a frog and by the time you get to the end of the thing, you spend $600,000 in little pieces. When Victoria first started seeing scams of this kind back around 2014, one of the tip-offs was poor grammar because so many of the scammers are based overseas, scamming in a second language. But with the arrival of AI, which can write and edit your prose in any language, it's harder to sniff scammers out. One thing Victoria has noticed is that the business of author scamming is very entrepreneurial. New outfits are constantly springing up and identifying the true scams can be tough. Though there are some general rules. You know, the publishing industry is secretive and the movie industry even more so. So, you know, you can pardon people for not knowing what protocols are, like the number one sign right now is out of lose, elicitation. And I tell author said, any out of the blue publishing or movie rights related email or phone call that you can't directly trace to a contact or acquiring that you yourself made is highly likely to be a scam. I mean, you can never say never in this business because literary agents sometimes do reach out to authors that they're interested in. Small presses may do the same. So, it's hard to draw an absolute line, but any kind of solicitation that you get out of the blue these days is very, very likely to be a scam. Are you from a lot of children's picture book authors? And I mean, especially you would think that Lionsgate is not going to be wanting to make a movie of your book about a mouse who has adventures, you know. Policing these scams is hard. The amounts of money being taken generally are just too small to get the attention of authorities. There's also the shame factor. All scammers benefit from the reality that a person who falls for a scam is often too embarrassed to tell anyone. It feels like whack a bowl and it feels like siss of us. You know, I feel like I'm constantly pushing this knowledge, bolder up here. Oh, and I never get past a certain point. When will her life's work be done? I suppose I'll die one day. Probably be of my computer answering an email. Kevin Datler, the hunter you heard about at the top of the episode, claims some responsibility for being drawn into the scam which cost him his life savings. He says he was just greedy. But I'm not so sure. More, I think this is just what effective scams do. They identify these vulnerabilities that many of us have and exploit them. People want to write memoirs or they want to pass on their experience of some traumatic life event. That's a big draw I think to self-publishing. They are, I think people are especially involved because it's not just a book in road. It's their life experience. It illustrates the intense psychological pressure that these scams put on people. They're adapted, you know, buttons to push. I mean, especially with writers, and especially self-published writers who just are in laboring and obscurity and you know, want to get their stories to the world when I'm writing career and nobody's buying your book, nobody's paying attention. I mean, it's just, it's a very potent psychological button that these scammers push. Communion is a production of campsite media and audio chuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean. This episode was written by me and Joe Barrett. It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimack. Theme music by Ewin Lightroom Ewan and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Grigoriatus, Matt Cher, and me Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow, and review Camillean on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. And if you have any feedback, tips, or story ideas, you can email us at CamilleanPod at campsitemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201, 743, 8368. Dial plus one from outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. I think Chuck would approve.
