I t started with an entirely ordinary interaction on LinkedIn. Someone had tagged me in a post, saying how much they’d enjoyed contributing to a New York Post article I’d written about “chronoworking”. As the author of a book about circadian rhythms, it was exactly the sort of subject I might write about. Except I’d never heard of this person, let alone interviewed them.

I clicked on the link and my stomach dropped. There, above an article about people who organise their working lives around their biological clocks, was my name: Linda Geddes.

It was the latest in a string of increasingly bizarre events that had begun three weeks earlier, when a friend who works as an editor at the scientific journal Nature texted to ask whether I’d been pitching stories to one of her colleagues. I hadn’t.

It turned out that someone had been approaching Nature editors using my name and an email address that wasn’t mine, referencing articles I’d previously written to make their pitches more convincing.…