Fraud

How to Cheat the Kindle Store (and Get Away With it!): The Chance Carter Story

1 June, 2018 // 13 Comments

For quite some time now I have been reporting on Amazon's over-reliance on poorly programmed bots that punish the innocent while letting scammers run rampant. Today I have an example scammer to show [Read More ...]

Marvel Editor Deceives Public, Gets Promoted to Editor-in-Chief

29 November, 2017 // 1 Comment

Bleeding Cool reported on Tuesday that Marvel Comic's new editor-in-chief, CB Cebulski, impersonated a Japanese writer 13 years ago while working for Marvel as an editor. From the Guardian (it's [Read More ...]

Copyright Trolls Threaten College Students With Million-Dollar Lawsuits, Deportation

18 September, 2016 // 1 Comment

For the past several years ethically-challenged companies and law firms have been threatening consumers with legally dubious demands(*) based on questionable evidence(**) of alleged piracy(***). [Read More ...]

Amazon’s Counterfeit Problem is Also an Opportunity

10 July, 2016 // 6 Comments

CNBC has a report this week which details how Amazon is quickly shifting from a great place to shop and a trusted retailer to being the next iteration of Ebay and flea markets. The report focuses on [Read More ...]

Buy a Book From Packt Publishing, and They’ll Bill You for an Unwanted Subscription

23 June, 2016 // 7 Comments

Packt Publishing was at one time one of the better technical publishers. They sell their ebooks DRM-free at reasonable prices and used to come highly recommended. But after their latest stunt I do [Read More ...]

Beware Summaries/Reviews Masquerading as Kindle eBooks

7 June, 2016 // 2 Comments

The Kindle Store, at one point or another, has been home to just about every type of spam from bundled Wikipedia articles to computer-generated nonsense to recycled stale AP articles. Now it has [Read More ...]

Amazon Files Suit Against Sellers of Fake Reviews

26 April, 2016 // 2 Comments

Amazon filed its third round of lawsuits against purveyors of fake product reviews last week. Geekwire and the Seattle Times report that the retailer is suing the alleged owner/operator of “Amazon [Read More ...]

Amazon Comments on TOC Crackdown, Inadvertently Confirms Kindle Unlimited Page Count Scam

14 March, 2016 // 30 Comments

News broke on Friday that Amazon was cracking down on authors and publishers who had put their TOCs at the end of the Kindle ebook, rather than at the beginning. On Monday Amazon confirmed the report [Read More ...]

Spot Fake Kindle Reviews With FakeSpot

25 January, 2016 // 65 Comments

Amazon has taken many steps to clean up its review section, including suing sellers of fake reviews and forbidding any relationship between author and reviewer, but sometimes that's just not enough. [Read More ...]

Beware the eBook Catfish

22 October, 2015 // 0 Comments

The Washington Post has coined a name for publishers who are turning the Kindle Store into their own personal content farm: ebook catfish. A catfish, as Urban Dictionary informs us, is someone who [Read More ...]

Amazon Files Suit Against a Thousand Fiverr Users for Selling Fake Reviews

16 October, 2015 // 24 Comments

In April of this year Amazon did something that it had never done before: it filed a lawsuit against four websites which had sold reviews to marketplace sellers on its site. It was only the [Read More ...]

Would-Be Barnes & Noble Buyer Settles Fraud Charges

25 September, 2015 // 3 Comments

Many were surprised when a little-known investment firm announced a buyout offer for B&N early last year. We couldn't figure out how the G Asset Management had raised the $640 million or [Read More ...]

Yi-Fen Chou, Or How a White Male Poet Gamed the System

8 September, 2015 // 10 Comments

Michael Derrick Hudson, a genealogist (*) at the Allen County Public Library in Indiana, is one of a handful of poets to have a work published in this year's Best American Poetry anthology, only [Read More ...]

eReader Maker Ectaco Caught Out in 5 Year Long Sockpuppet Scheme

25 July, 2013 // 7 Comments

Earlier today the online ereader community MobileRead Forums announced that they had caught a serious case of sockpuppets. They believe that Ectaco, a manufacturer of translation products and [Read More ...]