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Revealed: How One Amazon Kindle Scam Made Millions of Dollars (zdnet.com) 40

Posted by BeauHD 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.
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Revealed: How One Amazon Kindle Scam Made Millions of Dollars More

Revealed: How One Amazon Kindle Scam Made Millions of Dollars

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

  • 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?

    • 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?

    • "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.

  • 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.

    • 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 be

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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
        • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      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.

  • Other Book Scammers (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nova Express ( 100383 ) <lawrenceperson AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @07:05PM (#52973135) Homepage Journal

    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...

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dargaud ( 518470 )
        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 ?

        • 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.

        • 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.

    • 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 whol
  • 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.

  • Beware of Stephen King... (Score:3)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @07:16PM (#52973169)
    There's Stephen King (beloved novelist) and Stephen King (rip off artist) on Amazon. You need to double check before buying.
  • 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!
  • How to Recover from Unfortunate Chainsaw Accidents for Tupitsa

  • DRM is a scam (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 101percent ( 589072 )
    DRM Is a scam

  • Was my personal information used for this? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by shanen ( 462549 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @03:44AM (#52974951) Homepage Journal

    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.

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