A programmer appeared unfairly for over 200 million yen by camouflaging sales with Kindle e-book for 2 years without being caught by Amazon

E-books for Kindle sold on Amazon.com can decide whether to download books by referring to readers' reviews (book reviews) and download counts. The information on how many readers have been read by the reader is an important factor that greatly influences the way Kindle e-books are sold, but by doing this "catfishing" acts of convincing this information and boosting the number of downloads , It revealed the existence of a programmer who did it indifferently without being able to go to Amazon for a long period of 2 years.

Revealed: How one Amazon Kindle scam made millions of dollars | ZDNet
http://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-dollar-amazon-kindle-catfishing-scam/

On Amazon.com, it was Canadian Valerie Shelchenov who was selling books to unfairly large numbers of readers by impersonating fake reviews. Shellshnov is a programmer who has worked as a software developer for more than 10 years at Microsoft and is now a representative of startup Alteroxity. According to ZDNet, Shershhenov wrote cooking, diet, health books and the like on ghostwriters, and published it as a Kindle e-book as a work by an author of the same name.

This is an author's book called Emma Moore created by Shellshnov. Actually, there was no person who was Emma Moore, and the book written by Ghost Writer was issued under Emma Moore's name. By the way Emma Moore wrote five books in a month and published it as a Kindle e-book.


Although the act of publishing under such a pseudonym is not illegal in itself, the big problem of this time is that Shellshnov imitated "sales" of a fictional person's book. Shellshnov passes through 200 proxy servers and uses the tool called Selenium web driver to disguise as if a real person signs up to Amazon.com so that even if it is only confirmed, 80,000 I have created 3899 fake Amazon accounts.


In addition, Shellshnov acknowledges that royalty income will not enter, downloads it for free for a short time, distributes the book to a fictitious Amazon account with the IP address hidden via Tor of the anonymous network I downloaded it. Shershhenov was publishing a book focusing on relatively niche categories, so he was able to have it ranked in the top 100 sellers because it was downloaded in a short period of time. What is ranked in this Top 100 shows that many people are reading books, so those who saw the status of that rank in go out to buy Shehelshenov books Therefore, Shellshnov has made royalties indeed.


Shershhenov has published 1453 works as a Kendle e-book by catfishing and got 2.4 million dollars (about 250 million yen) in a couple of years in two years. Furthermore, it seems that as well as Kindle e-books there were sales of $ 83,340 (about 8.4 million yen) as a book. Shershhenov's actions are undoubtedly wrong, but it is not clear whether the act of selling books by misusing Amazon's system is an illegal fraud. On Amazon's Kindle e-book, malicious acts such as copying existing e-books and selling them without a title with a new title and title are rampant, Amazon has always been forced to take measures I will.

·bonus
Although it is Amazon which develops the Kindle e-book business in Japan, unlimited service "Kindle Unlimited"Because Kodansha's work has been sold too much, we unilaterally canceled it from free downloads, and when we receive protests from Kodansha, we will unexpectedly delete all of Kodansha's works of over 1000 titles unilaterally I got out of trouble with Kodansha.

About stopping the distribution of Kodansha work in the Amazon "Kindle Unlimited" service
(PDF file)http://www.kodansha.co.jp/upload/pr.kodansha.co.jp/files/pdf/20161003amazon.pdf


Also, when Mr. Hidefumi Sato asked for a disadvantageous change in the terms of the contract from Amazon, refused it, it revealed on Twitter that it sent a content certification mail asking for compensation for deletion of the work.

With respect to Kindle unlimited, for the case where it was requested to change the disadvantage of the contract condition from Amazon Joint Companies, refused this, most of the entries that had been deleted were deleted, and additional entries after that were not accepted, the company We sent a proof of content seeking compensation etc to.

- Sato Hidefumi (@ shuho_sato)September 30, 2016