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If you visit the website of renowned Canadian novelist Patrick deWitt today, you’ll see a surprising message. “THIS IS NOT PATRICK DEWITT”, it says.
That’s because the domain has been taken over by a cybersquatter. Not just any cybersquatter, mind – this one has literary ambitions.
The unpublished writer apparently noticed that deWitt had let the domain lapse, and decided to register it for themselves. Clicking on the page takes you to an about section, which announces:
Patrick deWitt is an award-winning author who has written 4 best-selling novels.
This is not his site.
I have not made any films. I have not written any award-winning books.
If you want to do something that is singularly unrewarding, write a novel.
Anyway, Patrick deWitt wasn’t using this site, so rather than waste your time with a blank page, I thought I would join you here and we could share a moment.
As if that wasn’t cheeky enough, the sneaky scribe has also posted their own manuscript on the site. Called In God’s Silence, Them Devils Sang, the author describes it as an acid western.
The news hit the internet last week, but this has been going on for a while. The first instance of the cybersquatter’s site shows up on the Wayback Machine (a site that archives snapshots of web pages) on 10 November 2018. Let’s Encrypt issued an SSL certificate for the domain on 11 July 2019, although the mysterious cybersquatter doesn’t seem to be using it as yet. As of today, the site was still using plain old HTTP.