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Revealed: How One Amazon Kindle Scam Made Millions of Dollars (zdnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the trick-or-treat dept.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt with us from a report via ZDNet that summarizes a catfishing scheme designed to deceive Amazon users into buy low-quality ebooks: Emma Moore is just one of hundreds of pseudonyms employed in a sophisticated "catfishing" scheme run by Valeriy Shershnyov, whose Vancouver-based business hoodwinks Amazon customers into buying low-quality ebooks, which have been boosted on the online marketplace by an unscrupulous system of bots, scripts, and virtual servers. Catfishing isn't new -- it's been well documented. Some scammers buy fake reviews, while others will try other ways to game the system. Until now, nobody has been able to look inside at how one of these scams work -- especially one that's been so prolific, generating millions of dollars in royalties by cashing in on unwitting buyers who are tricked into thinking these ebooks have some substance. Shershnyov was able to stay in Amazon's shadows for two years by using his scam server conservatively so as to not raise any red flags. What eventually gave him away weren't customer complaints or even getting caught. It was good old-fashioned carelessness. He forgot to put a password on his server.

40 comments

  1. Forgot the password? by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1

    See, that's why you SHOULD use "password" as your password - you won't forget it!

    --
    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    1. Re:Forgot the password? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Could have been worse. He could have forgotten to read a word, or two.

  2. Idiot could have used his name as password by Provocateur · · Score: 1

    It's all consonants.

    There is ONE vowel. And no, "y" is not a Russian vowel.

    It has one special character. It wears pants.

    Seriously, he couldn't think of a password?

    --
    WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
    1. Re:Idiot could have used his name as password by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 1

      There is ONE vowel. And no, "y" is not a Russian vowel.

      So I'm curious: In "Shershnyov", do you consider "e" or "o" to not be a vowel?

      --

      How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
    2. Re:Idiot could have used his name as password by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

      "There is ONE vowel. And no, "y" is not a Russian vowel."

      In transliterations of Russian, 'y' is either a part of the vowels 'ye' 'yo' or 'ya', or the short I sound in words like Kosygin.

  3. That's why you pirate by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Download the book/music/movie/show from somewhere and try it once. If you like it enough to read/listen/view again or you want to support the creator then go and buy a copy. Preferably from the source that takes the least amount of overhead.

    1. Re:That's why you pirate by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      I 100% agree with that. pirating is actually good for the economy if people use it correctly. we all know that anything advertised to us for movies tv shows or even music alot of times is almost completely the BEST parts all thrown into a 30-45 second clip. if you get to download and test for yourself, find you like it. THEN you should spend your money on the content to support the creator to in all hopes get more content that you like. I have done this with a few different games in the past. Borderlands being one of them. i played it for a day or 2 and then i went and bought a copy of it. same thing with max payne. i downloaded it. played it for an hour or 2 and realized i didnt at all like the game play and deleted every trace of it.

    2. Re:That's why you pirate by Quirkz · · Score: 1

      With Amazon, you don't even need to pirate. You can get a free sample of the first 10% of the book right there in the site.

      --
      The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
    3. Re:That's why you pirate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First 10% is substance.

      "Let's make it 20%"

      First 20% is substance.

      "Let's make it 100%"

      Authors stop making money.

    4. Re:That's why you pirate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Obviously many people claim that they do that. Some of them are telling the truth. But really - you played a game for 2 hours and then didn't pay for it. That is pretty ridiculous. The same thing if you watch a movie - and decide, meh, it was only OK - not paying for it. Sorry, wrong. If you consume it, pay for it. If you don't want to - that's cool too. Don't watch / play it then. But the world doesn't work on a "I get entertained first, then decide if it was worth it" model. It works on copyright - which says you can do something (watch, play, rent, etc.) a copy after you pay. Like it or not, that's the way it works.

    5. Re:That's why you pirate by Quirkz · · Score: 1

      Aw, don't go all slippery slope on me. For a scam like this, even 10% would have been more than enough to indicate that the book wasn't worthwhile, because it didn't have that much substance in it, and was poorly done.

      --
      The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
    6. Re:That's why you pirate by hackwrench · · Score: 1

      The world works with a wide variety of legal and illegal activities and even death. To pretend a part of the world is not how the world works is stupid.

    7. Re:That's why you pirate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I pirate all of my books, music, movies and games. Anything I like, I buy if I can get it DRM-free and everything else gets trashed.

  4. Other Book Scammers by Nova+Express · · Score: 4, Informative

    Other book scammers offering books tht look like low-cost omnibus editions, but which are actually compilations of Wikipedia articles and other content-scraped public-domain material, are:

    Let the buyer beware...

    --
    Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)

    http://www.lawrenceperson.com/

  5. Great by HangingChad · · Score: 1

    I bust my ass to produce quality content and get nowhere and he fronts crap work and makes millions. If he would have used that talent to front really good authors, that would be a service.

    --
    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
    1. Re:Great by hey! · · Score: 2

      No, is work (barring the password gaffe) is of generally quite high quality. It's the product he's selling that's crap. He's a scam artist. not an author.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    2. Re:Great by dargaud · · Score: 1

      I don't understand when the scam is. He makes crappy books by scrapping public-domain services. Okay, probably low-quality and not much added value, but could be useful. He pushes them up with fake review. Okay, immoral, but a lot of people do it. Just read the negative and average reviews before buying and you should avoid it, no ? Am I missing something ?

      --
      Non-Linux Penguins ?
    3. Re:Great by thomas.galvin · · Score: 1

      He spams his books with hundreds of fake positive reviews, drowning out the honest, negative reviews. "Taking he average" doesn't work, because there's so little signal compared to all the noise.

      --
      Thomas Galvin
    4. Re:Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He also gives away the book for free at first, and downloads it thousands of times make it appear in the top 100 books before selling it. Also, there must be people who have bought it first for there to be negative reviews, so I don't think just counting on negative reviews to fix the issue is a winning strategy.

      I can understand why Amazon would want to shut people like him down - he greatly lowers the value of their top charts, making people suspicious of impulse buys. I think Amazon should simply ignore free downloads when making their top charts. This may go a long way towards fixing the problem.

    5. Re:Great by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      I don't understand when the scam is. He makes crappy books by scrapping public-domain services. Okay, probably low-quality and not much added value, but could be useful. He pushes them up with fake review. Okay, immoral, but a lot of people do it.

      TFA says that what he's doing is probably not actually illegal.

      But just because something's legal doesn't mean that it's right.

      Just read the negative and average reviews before buying and you should avoid it, no ? Am I missing something ?

      If you have hundreds of fake positive reviews, the occasional honest negative review will get overlooked. Who reads every review anyway? And who bothers to write negative reviews, come to think of it? If I'd downloaded a book and it was crap, I really wouldn't feel much incentive to waste more of my time writing a review. This applies even more so if the book was free.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    6. Re:Great by hackwrench · · Score: 1

      Cry me a river. I'm sorry your role in doing whatever it is you do is so hard on you. We don't reward people based on how hard whatever it is they do is for them. The intellectual property worshipers like to trot out that notion, but that's not how it works at least most of the time. There's no way of measuring how much of your effort actually goes into a work. Two people can come up with the same thing and one person worked a lot at it than the other. We currently reward who is first. I don't like the whole intellectual property model. If you can get me something and pitch me something, I can be willing to pay for it up front. The whole idea that a person can hold the world hostage on a topic, no matter how narrow is an affront to well being.

    7. Re:Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which is why GP suggested reading the reviews with a low rating.

      If the book is actually a wikipedia scrape you expect the low reviews to be things like "not really a book, total scam" while if it's a real book you'll tend to see things like "The cover had a picture of dragon on it but the only dragon in the book has like 1 line, total false advertising".

      If there are no negative reviews than you presume that all the reviews are probably bogus and proceed with the knowledge that it could be a scam.

  6. What gave him away weren't customer complaints by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

    Of course no. We, customers, as so used to download crappy stuff, apps and other low quality human-made material that when a bot generates them automatically we don't see a difference.

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    Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
  7. Beware of Stephen King... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

    There's Stephen King (beloved novelist) and Stephen King (rip off artist) on Amazon. You need to double check before buying.

  8. BAN PASSWORDS by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

    Apparently the reason were not catching criminals is because they are using passwords! We need to ban password use on the internet for national security. statistically every criminal uses a password to his his illicit activity! we need to pass a law to either ban passwords, use extensive background checks, or make passwords illegal for criminal activity! We need to stop the abuse of passwords by criminals!

  9. I wonder if he'd be interested in my book by mnemotronic · · Score: 2

    How to Recover from Unfortunate Chainsaw Accidents for Tupitsa

    --
    The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
  10. Catfishing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I thought catfishing was pretending to be a girl, and stringing a guy along in a fake relationship, ala Manti Te'o. When did the definition change to include selling fake ebooks? It's hard to keep up with the lingo these days...

    1. Re:Catfishing? by srmalloy · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Wikipedia article describes it as "Catfishing is a type of deceptive activity involving a person creating a sock puppet social networking presence for nefarious purposes."; doing it to carry on a fake relationship is perhaps the canonical example, as the term is taken from the movie Catfish, where this was the central theme of the movie, but it's not the only application of the term.

  11. seems similar to SEO shady practices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    the formula: put your work up for free, have your friends download it as a favor, or use fake accounts to download, watch it climb the charts; bingo you're in business

  12. DRM is a scam by 101percent · · Score: 1, Insightful

    DRM Is a scam

  13. I assume by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... buying low-quality e-books ...

    So does this fraud work because getting $15 back is too much effort, or it is like a "your computer has a virus" scam (the internet version of "you've been cursed"), where people find they've paid $150 to put a virus on their computer but after paying more to get their computer fixed, still don't dispute the fraudulent charge?

  14. Was my personal information used for this? by shanen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Trying to judge from this summary if I was involved... There was a quasi-fake account created using my name and email address. One so-called support person claimed it was created with a bug in the Android reader, but I'm not convinced and the "discussion" went on for some months without solving the problem in the obvious way. (Nuke the imposter and block the email address.) I gave up for a long time, but after a year tried again and escalated all the way up...

    Suddenly the problem seems to have gone away, but Amazon got all quiet about it. There were three or four "phase transitions" over the 15 months the problem went on, but only two of them seemed to have clear angles for making money--but this article seems to have suggested a couple of angles that I hadn't considered. My latest theory was that it might be something like the Wells Fargo scam, creating fake accounts to boost some kind of internal accounting numbers. Based on dormant accounts?

    Just for background, I had used Amazon around the year 2000. I had accounts on Amazon.com and one of the international Amazons, but after they abused my personal information, I stopped doing business with them. (Still reading lots of books, but NO plans to use Amazon EVER again.) However, at least one of the accounts still exists, and it is possible that some of the information from that account was used for the fake account--but Amazon refused to provide any details to prove (or disprove) it.

    --
    Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
  15. "He forgot to put a password on his server." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is that even possible? Are you able to rent a server that doesn't have a password requirement already, for all access? (I'm presuming he didn't set up the server himself, and deliberately remove the password option...)

    1. Re:"He forgot to put a password on his server." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I guess he set up passwordless VNC, which is quite easy to do. Password ( and other auth methods ) SSH, not so much.

  16. oxymoron by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    all e-books are low quality - not much of a scam

  17. But.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This guy did not commit any other crime than selling crappy books..
    The security researchers commited a fellony by going in and poaking around and actually caused damages for millions..

    1. Re:But.. by John.Banister · · Score: 1

      You're incorrect. Using lots of bogus accounts to tell lies that make your crappy books look cool is a crime.

    2. Re:But.. by m00sh · · Score: 1

      You're incorrect. Using lots of bogus accounts to tell lies that make your crappy books look cool is a crime.

      It's against the terms of service but not a crime.

    3. Re:But.. by John.Banister · · Score: 1

      The name given to this crime is fraud.

    4. Re: But.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I suspect it can be rather hard to get someone convicted for such fraud as there was most likeley lots of bad reviews there also. And if you did not read them its your own fault.
      It would be interesting to see this in court.
      Write false reviews yould become criminal :D