Since the Wonka fiasco, Coull has taken steps to scrub various social accounts, taking down both a LinkedIn profile and a YouTube channel where it appears he presented himself as something of a business guru and life coach. His personal site, also deleted, touted a number of dubious academic degrees and said he worked as a “consultant” for a brand called Empowerity, which is now defunct. As of 2021, he was co-directing a Glasgow foodbank that he claimed fed thousands of families a month — that, too, no longer exists, and some Glaswegians suspect it was not entirely above board.
---
Neither has he pulled down his Instagram account, which contains only a few posts hyping independently published books available on Amazon. These include titles such as Selling Innocence, a novel about a human trafficking survivor who “navigates a treacherous landscape filled with politicians, clergymen, celebrities, and billionaires.” The language hints at themes of the QAnon conspiracist movement and misinformation about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
---
The 16 books on Coull’s Amazon author page were all published in the summer of 2023 — some of them on the very same day. The synopsis for each is AI-generated, according to GPTZero analysis, and so is the text between the covers, as one irate reviewer has complained. Coull couldn’t even be bothered to pen his own author bio, which declares him a “rising star in the literary world” who “weaves spellbinding tales that delve into the mysterious realms of fictional thrillers and gripping conspiracies.” While some of the stories are generic puzzle-driven plots in the vein of The DaVinci Code, others — like Selling Innocence — are geared toward paranoid right-wing politics. Operation Inoculation, for example, promises a “conspiratorial journey into vaccination truth” related to the so-called “deep state,” in which ” the carefully constructed facade of the vaccination campaign begins to crumble.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/cu ... 76876/amp/
