When news broke a little over two months ago that the Brazilian author person Cristiane Serruya had copied parts of Courtney Milan's book, The Duchess War, little did we...
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Category: Fraud
IRS, FBI Raid Baltimore Mayor in the Wake of a “Books for Contracts” Corruption Scandal
When I reported on Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh taking a leave of absence a few weeks ago following revelations that companies and charities had bought her children's book, and...
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How to Cheat the Kindle Store (and Get Away With it!): The Chance Carter Story
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...
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Marvel Editor Deceives Public, Gets Promoted to Editor-in-Chief
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 the...
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Copyright Trolls Threaten College Students With Million-Dollar Lawsuits, Deportation
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(***). We've seen this in...
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Amazon’s Counterfeit Problem is Also an Opportunity
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...
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Buy a Book From Packt Publishing, and They’ll Bill You for an Unwanted Subscription
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...
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Beware Summaries/Reviews Masquerading as Kindle eBooks
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...
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Amazon Files Suit Against Sellers of Fake Reviews
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...
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Amazon Comments on TOC Crackdown, Inadvertently Confirms Kindle Unlimited Page Count Scam
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...
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Spot Fake Kindle Reviews With FakeSpot
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...
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Beware the eBook Catfish
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...
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Amazon Files Suit Against a Thousand Fiverr Users for Selling Fake Reviews
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...
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Would-Be Barnes & Noble Buyer Settles Fraud Charges
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 so it...
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Yi-Fen Chou, Or How a White Male Poet Gamed the System
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...
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