Having checked several of the books (they seem to be mainly the ‘Steamy Romance’ (erotic?) kind), and found exactly what David states in this post, so reblogging to make everyone aware of this issue.
BTW – I’d STRONGLY recommend you do NOT attempt to download these ‘bargain freebies’ – they might contain malware, or at the very least, give your details to a click farm 😱
Fake books – powered by clickfarms – are gatecrashing Amazon’s charts. And despite being aware of the issue for well over a year, Amazon has failed to resolve it.
If you look at the Kindle Store Best Seller charts right now, and click over to Free Books, you will see that the Top 20 currently has five suspicious-looking titles.
None of them have reviews. All were published in the last week. They have no Also Boughts – meaning they have had very few sales. Each of these titles are around 2,500 pages long, seem to have duplicated content, and are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
What is going on here?
For over fifteen months now, scammers have been raiding the Kindle Unlimited pot using a well-worn trick. They usually pilfer the content first of all – often by stealing an author’s original work and running it through a synonymizer – and…
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Does this mean we should not offer our books for free at any time on Amazon?
Geesh! What next?
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How interesting that for ages Amazon have been hit by fake reviews but finally they are being hit by fake books. Interesting to see how this pans out.
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Thanks for the heads-up. Sharing… xo
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Thanks, Bette 😃
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Thanks for sharing this, Chris. Seems like Amazon should be able to figure this out if they want to. 😦
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But it seems they don’t want to, Diana 🙁
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Which seems so strange in light of their concern about the customer experience. They go overboard on scanning for fake reviews and here they have fake books. Makes little sense.
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Thank You for the ALERT!
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Welcome, Michael 👍
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These scammers….. * shakes head *
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Yep – They take the enjoyment out of browsing for books, Ren 😡
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They’ll do anything for a buck, even steal candies from children…..
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This actually explains so much of what I was looking at when my last book came out. This and people slapping on every category title they can think of, which is why I see romance and sci-fi in the epic fantasy/sword & sorcery lists.
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You should see what comes up under Children’s Books, Charles 😱
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I’m very afraid to look.
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The kids would learn the truth about The Birds and The Bees story!
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They really need some quality control over there. Not just for reviews, but categories and books. I still remember one of my friends stumbling onto a 99 cent book that was one word on the first page followed by a bunch of blank pages.
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WOW – Did he get a refund?
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I think he found out by checking the sample. The description was badly written and suspicious.
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