victoriastrauss said:
If you check the State of Florida's incorporation records, Jennifer Dublino is corporate officer/registered agent for several corporations.
Go here and do a search on "Dublino, Jennifer". The results are...interesting.
Interesting? Yes. What do you want to bet that the State of Florida doesn't require that in order for someone to be listed as the corporate officer/registered agent, they have to show up in person with a valid picture ID?
I've spent some time poking around in the areas PianoTuna mentioned. I can't guarantee that he was right, but everything I found on the Dublinos was a loosely controlled or anonymously authored online record. The Dublinos were otherwise incorporeal.
PianoTuna said there was identifiable fraud committed in the attempt to establish the existence of Anthony Dublino. As PT pointed out, Anthony Dublino was, in one loosely-controlled online directory, listed as an executive at CoSite, a real company. CoSite was a Boca Raton dotcom that made good, got bought out by CEMEX, and moved out of the country. Claiming Dublino had worked for them was clever: CoSite was a plausible employer for him, but it was no longer possible to ask them about his time there.
As I understand it, the reason PianoTuna decided Anthony Dublino hadn't worked for CoSite was that (1.) he was listed in that directory as one of four guys in a department, and none of the other three had any other detectable existence; and (2.) the office address given for CoSite in that listing has no other recorded connection with the company.
That is: You get into one of those online directories that'll let you enter your own information. You list your spoof identity plus three other invented guys as a four-man department in a company that has since left town. You give your mail service's address as the office address -- how often do people check to see whether an old no-longer-valid address was one the company actually used? Result: there's a plausible-looking online listing that says that Anthony Dublino once had an actual job at an actual company.
I found one reference to Jennifer Dublino having once been employed, again at a company that had since gone out of business. The record was on the website of a national academic olympics thingy. The listing was for people who'd volunteered to let their company's offices be used as meeting space for organizing the local instantiation of these academic olympics. Poking around further, I found that this list of people who'd volunteered space was posted months before the Florida meeting was supposed to happen, but that anyone who'd volunteered their offices could still bow out up to two weeks before the meeting date. If you volunteered, then cancelled in time, it would create a plausible-looking online record.
That attorney Jennifer Dublino supposedly worked for does seem to be real, but ... I don't know exactly how to say this, but there's something very odd about him. He's a real guy whose connections are mostly unreal, and when they aren't unreal, they're weird. It's like he's constantly surrounded by a cloud of ghosts and shadows.
The other peculiar thing about Fletcher is that while he appears to be connected to a warehouse's worth of smoke and mirrors, almost none of it has anything to do with his publishing scams.
Thus for the information that's there; onward to the information that isn't.
I'll grant that there are people who go through this world without leaving footprints. They aren't agents. A working literary agent is informationally leaky. They give people their cards. They enter into negotiations. They make dates with editors. People talk with agents, and they talk about them. They submit stuff to them, and complain about the response time. They invite them to speak to their writers' groups. They ask questions about them online. They mention them in their acknowledgements.
Let's step back from the question of whether Sydra/ST/Stylus is a legitimate agency. If they're doing any significant amount of business (which, alas, they seem to be), and if Jennifer Dublino were there in the midst of it, there'd be little fossil records of interactions with her all over the Net. Those fossils don't exist. Google will show you lots of people having interactions with Robert Fletcher, but no one having interactions with Jennifer Dublino.
I have serious trouble believing in the existence of a working agent who never talks to anyone, never meets with anyone, is not gossiped about by anyone, and has no identifiable role in any negotiations or deals.
Thank you so much for telling us... and welcome aboard!