Patrick Reames had no idea why Amazon.com sent him a 1099 form saying he’d made almost $24,000 selling books via Createspace, the company’s on-demand publishing arm. That is, until he searched the site for his name and discovered someone has been using it to peddle a $555 book that’s full of nothing but gibberish.
Reames is a credited author on Amazon by way of several commodity industry books, although none of them made anywhere near the amount Amazon is reporting to the Internal Revenue Service. Nor does he have a personal account with Createspace.
But that didn’t stop someone from publishing a “novel” under his name. That word is in quotations because the publication appears to be little more than computer-generated text, almost like the gibberish one might find in a spam email.[…]
Reames said he suspects someone has been buying the book using stolen credit and/or debit cards, and pocketing the 60 percent that Amazon gives to authors. At $555 a pop, it would only take approximately 70 sales over three months to rack up the earnings that Amazon said he made.[…]
krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/mon … on-amazon/
This blew my mind. Not because of the venality (background noise) but because of the harm done to the random guy for whom Amazon seems unwilling to issue a corrected tax form…Ahhhhhhhhhhhmazon???
Keep eyes wide open:
A female priest said Amazon sold $240,000 worth of counterfeit copies of her faith-based book – before it was removed from the top-bookselling site.
Tish Harrison Warren, a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, is the author of “Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life,” her first book which took her three years to complete.
But she found out from her publisher, InterVarsity Press (IVP), it was copied and sold by a third-party on Amazon for about nine months. The New York Times reported in June that there was a surge of counterfeit books on the top bookseller’s site.
IVP estimates 15,000 fake copies were sold before a customer complained in June, alerting them to the scheme totaling over $240,000 in lost revenue for Warren.[…]
Amazon removed the re-sellers of the counterfeit editions from its stores after IVP filed a formal complaint through the Seattle-based tech company’s standard protocols.[…]
foxnews.com/tech/amazon-boo … -fake-sold