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Since 2015, Amazon has been actively trying to stomp out scammers exploiting authors. As I first reported in 2015, foremost among these were fake reviews, but a couple of months ago it upped the ante by filing arbitration complaints against five individuals who it says offered services to KDP author and publishers aimed at helping them manipulate the reading platform for financial gain. Amazon is demanding a combination of injunctive relief, account termination and, in some cases, triple damages.
As Publishers Weekly reports, Amazon alleges that five people used a number of prohibited strategies to manipulate customers reviews and worked to inflate sales and royalties. Amazon essentially charges that a handful of individuals worked to create fake reviews for their books and others’ in addition to attempts to manipulate Amazon systems that count book sales and the royalties paid to authors via its subscription reading service.
For Whom The Bell Tolls
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Named in the complaint is Nilmer Rubio, a Philippino who Amazon says attempted to manipulate Kindle Unlimited pages read. Amazon alleges Rubio approached KDP authors with a scheme to “use a multitude of Amazon accounts to artificially inflate the author’s numbers,” in exchange for 40% of the revenue.
In two other filings, Terrance Li of Ontario, Canada, and Alexis Pablo Marrocco of Argentina were accused of trafficking in fake book reviews. In Li’s case, Amazon said it found 75 percent — 1,471 of the 1,957 reviews — associated with Li’s how-to and learning books were “abusive” and were removed.
The last two filings, involving Thomas Glenn of Miami, Florida, and Jake Dryan of London, England, involved alleged scams to push books higher on best-seller lists. Dryan was also accused of “hyperlink abuse,” a practice now blocked by Amazon in which an author includes in the first few pages of a book a hyperlink that will send readers to the end of a book. The scam helps artificially increase the number of pages read and therefore royalty payments.
Another respondent named in the complaint is Thomas Glenn (aka Thomas Castillo or Thomas Glenn Castillo), who runs the Free Book Service. Amazon alleges this company “offers KDP publishers the ability to artificially inflate their ranking within Amazon Best Sellers.”
Part Of A Pattern
As CNet reports, Amazon has been using these kinds of legal actions since 2015 to fight against scams and has already sued over 1,000 entities involved in allegedly creating fake product reviews on its sites. The company last year also sued alleged counterfeiters. Amazon pursued these arbitration filings, an alternative system to resolve disputes without having to go to court because the Kindle Direct Publishing terms and conditions require any disagreement involving that business must go through the arbitration association.
It is astonishing to note that four out of five alleged scammers are not even in the US. The international nature of these scams and the company’s need to continue taking these legal steps point to how hard it can be to stamp out online scams. They also show how difficult it is for Amazon to police its enormous list of hundreds of millions of product pages. By taking legal action, Amazon may be hoping it can dissuade would-be scammers from coming to its site in the first place, making its job a little easier.
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Glad to hear Amazon is policing the reviews for authenticity.
Same here! They do tend to err on the side of caution, though, which can be frustrating at times. I haven’t been able to review many a book I’ve enjoyed because Amazon thinks it’s a biased review.
☹️☹️☹️
They’re keeping a lot of lawyers happy too. 😀
Lol – there’s that, too 😀
Good! I’m glad Amazon is going after these scammers. They hurt ever legitimate author. Thanks for sharing, Nicholas. 🙂
I’m with you 🙂
HI Nicolas,
I too, even at my level, have received scams. It red flags me when I get them from my personal email accounts. I try to use my gmail account for all my writing links. However, Amazon has both. The ones that I can’t tell if they are legitimate I offer an exchange my review for their’s. I usually don’t hear back from them. Thanks for keeping us informed.
Thanks for sharing that, Chuck!
Thanks for keeping me up to date on these issues, Nicholas. I’m not hearing this news anywhere else, so this is really valuable!
Yay! Thank you, Joy 🙂
Thanks for keeping us updated and happy Friday!
You too, Elle! Thank you for the visit 🙂
Thank you, Nicholas C. Rossis, for yet another cogent, practical, helpful, and extremely informative post. I wouldn’t know about any of the Amazon scams if you hadn’t described them in previous posts. It’s comforting, now, to know that Amazon is still fighting the good fight.
Indeed they are! Thank you so much, Iris 🙂
This is excellent news for us authors. Yeah, it’s sad that there are people like that in the world but there it is. I always go with the tortoise approach to book reviews. It’s better to go slow and gain faithful readers than to get 100 reviews in the first week of a release. The bestseller lists have been rigged (read paid off) for decades by big 5 publishers; just one of the many dirty secrets of the publishing world.
I love the tortoise approach myself! It’s how I’ve managed to gain some 500 reviews (and counting). Not all of them are glowing (indeed, there are several scathing ones) but at least I didn’t have to pay for them 🙂
I’d much rather have only a couple authentic reviews from actual readers than those fake ones. I still can’t believe how much some reviews cost. I mean who has $500 to spend on a review from Kirkus? Surely not me. All my money goes to editing, book cover and formatting.
Tell me about it. I’m so grateful to all you wonderful people who have reviewed-thank you!!
I am constantly contacted with offers of free stuff (and books) in return for a ‘fair’ review. In many cases, they imply that a ‘favourable review’ will mean I get bigger and better offers. I just delete the emails, as I know they are targeting all top 5000 reviewers on Amazon.
Earlier this year, Amazon banned the use of ‘free codes’ with such offers, so they now have to ask us to pay for the ‘free’ items, and offer a refund via PayPal. Someone would have to be crazy to go down that route. Not only do you lay out your own money in the first place, you have to supply them with your PayPal details to receive the ‘refund’.
So many scams and fake reviews going around, it is becoming impossible to judge anything based on them.
Best wishes, Pete.
Pete, I get those offers too and I just delete them all. Most of the them come from Asia anyway. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. I still see authors who run a giveaway asking people to review and they could win an Amazon gift card. That’s now against Amazon’s TOS. Whenever I’m approached for an honest review, I always tell them I will disclose all relevant information as to how I got the product and what I thought.
Sound advice!
When bloggers offer me free books for review, I generally buy them. But only if they are reasonably priced, and I want to support someone in the community. That way the review gets a ‘Verified Purchase’ tag, and has no suspicion attached to it.
You are right to say that most of the ‘free offer’ stuff comes from China. I have recently removed my email address from my Amazon profile because of the amount I get from there.
Regards, Pete.
You’re the best! The offer for a guest post stands, by the way 🙂
OK, Nicholas, I will let you know, and send an email.
Looking forward to it! Thank you, Pete 🙂
I do that too. I’d rather spend a buck to have Amazon bump up my review to the top of the pile and not have my review removed. I can’t remove my email from my Amazon profile because a lot of authors I’ve never heard of find me on Amazon. I think I started getting tons of emails for reviews when I hit the Top 1000 on AmazonCA and top 10,000 on AmazonUS. I wonder if Amazon sells our names to merchants… for a fee of course. lol!
That’s possible. I’m sure that my ranking only counts on Amazon Europe though. (No idea how to work that out)
Regards, Pete.
I post my reviews to AmazonUS, AmazonCA and AmazonUK. I have three rankings, one for each region.
Wow… One of these days, you have to write a guest post about your experience as a top Amazon reviewer.