Oh my gosh. Thank you for sharing all of that, Tim. It could save a lot of writers from being led on in the same way you were, by showing them some of the warning signs.
And in fact, if you had mentioned before that they were a fee charging agency, I would have given you a different answer to the question, "why would they go to all that trouble?" Also, those frequent reports on where the manuscript was at any given moment, those same reports that must have been so reassuring -- from where I sit, that was a bad sign in itself. I've been represented by three different legitimate agents over the years, and none of them were so flatteringly attentive. They don't have time for weekly reports (they're too busy reading manuscripts and talking to editors and otherwise conducting their business). It's the old story: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Confidence tricksters take the time because they have the time. Conning people is their job, they don't have another, and it's all in the way of business. Besides, they can run multiple cons at the same time. In this case, of course, the agency you signed with seem to have saved themselves a lot of trouble by sending many people the same bogus reports.
The father-in-law of a friend of mine was recently the victim of a "sweetheart scam." The woman spent many months building up a relationship with him, leading him on, taking him for relatively small amounts of money at a time, but it was beginning to add up. And she was only seeing him a couple of nights a week, which left her plenty of time to con other elderly gentlemen simultaneously. After some investigation by my friend and her husband, it also turned out that this woman was running several shady businesses on the side, under different names. As I said, it adds up.
While trying to uncover what was going on, my friend did an enormous amount of research on con artists and scammers, and learned some fairly hair-raising truths. There are families for whom scamming is the family business -- none of them have to learn from scratch, they're taught the business by relatives with years of experience and learn the techniques from the cradle up. There is a word I am not using, which applies to many of them, but I am not going to say it because it refers to an entire ethnic group, most of whom are honest and hardworking. Not all families of con artists belong to this group, any more than all people of this ethnicity are con artists, but when the two come together we are talking about families and traditions that go back not for years, or decades, but for centuries. In other words, they are very good at what they do. Very good.
Your Christopher Hill may not belong to one of these families, but you can pretty much bet that he has as much experience and skill as he claims ... although not, alas, in the publishing field.
