Money Laundering Via Author Impersonation on Amazon?

[Paul Whybrow]

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This article draws attention to a fraudulent activity that is profoundly disturbing:

Money Laundering Via Author Impersonation on Amazon? — Krebs on Security

It's not something that most writers would even imagine could be going on, by stealing their identity. Just think what it could do to your credit rating alone, while you disputed tax bills for earnings that were in your name only, and which you were wholly ignorant of!

What astounds me about the entire story, is that it's so obviously a fraudulent scheme. Don't Amazon run security checks on books of gobbledegook priced at hundreds of dollars? Then, there's the issue of bogus helpline numbers, ostensibly for Amazon, that further mine the personal information of bewildered customers.

Amazon is so huge, like a lumbering Brontosaurus, that it's not surprising that it offers a home to harmful parasites

Not only are scammers making money from authors' identities via Createspace, they're also plagiarising work by stealing portions of different textbooks and lumping them together:

Scammers Are Using Createspace to Spam Amazon With Pirated Textbooks | The Digital Reader

Publishing is a jungle: let's be careful out there!

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[Amber]

Would it be fine if I'm not, I don't know, disturbed? -- caveat emptor or would it be emptor caveat. I probably should consult a Latin scholar. If these were desperate times, I'd make more of an effort. But they're not, so Seller Beware. Also, when you think of it, amazon is selling their storefront services, and I imagine other things (like many many other things, if we're not careful, we'll all soon be notified we need to move off planet -- god sold the Earth through Amazon), and so caveat emptor or buyer beware absolutely applies.

But. Seriously. If you have fiction on Amazon, it's a good idea to regularly monitor how your name, and the title of your book, comes up in google searches. Even, the misspellings of your name.

Also, there's nothing preventing authors from calling Amazon and doing a little internal audit of their own.

And WHY isn't there a latin phrase for reader beware because Paul my Dear Watson, the entire thing is also a scam, perpetrated via article teasing, promoting Krebs security.

....this one goes out to my fans ... EDIT! Also, take a peek at what kind of books Patrick Reames really writes. Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.

 

[AgentPete]

Don't Amazon run security checks on books of gobbledegook priced at hundreds of dollars?

Apparently not. I had someone upload a ms in my client's name - why? Any sales, such as they were, would have come to the client. Very odd.