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

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.

Comments

Was my personal information used for this?

[shanen]

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.