[555aaa]

The Donkey In Meadow is up to 109.

 

[Joseph Malik]

What really makes this crazy is that "Champion Donkey" is my porn name.

(You take your first pet's name, and the street you grew up on . . . you know what? I'll just show myself out.)

 

[Atlantisatheart]

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Content removed due to new owners; VerticalScope Inc. TOS Change of 2018. I received no notification of a change to TOS, was never asked to agree to their data mining or sharing of my information, including sales of my information and ownership of my posts, intellectual rights, etc, and I do not agree to the terms.

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[Jena H]

So are these shysters making money on KU page reads?  'Cuz I can't imagine anyone paying $9.99 for these books.

 

[Carol (was Dara)]

So are these shysters making money on KU page reads? 'Cuz I can't imagine anyone paying $9.99 for these books.

I doubt they want actual readers to buy them. Actual purchasers would draw unwanted attention by returning and reporting the books, getting them yanked faster by Amazon. It's about KU page reads.

 

[PearlEarringLady]

I don't know, if they really didn't want to be discovered, I'm sure they had much better ways of doing this, like doubling the number of books and halving the number of reads per book so that none of them get attention like this...

This is my feeling, too. It's just so outrageously blatant that the scammer's account is going to be taken down long before he/she can collect any payout. So why do it? Either it's just malicious, to screw Amazon over, or it's a well-intentioned attempt to force Amazon to change their system by breaking it comprehensively. At this point, I really see no alternative to human eyes on every KU book before they go into the system. I for one would be happy to pay for increased scrutiny rather than this shambles.

 

[Atlantisatheart]

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Content removed due to new owners; VerticalScope Inc. TOS Change of 2018. I received no notification of a change to TOS, was never asked to agree to their data mining or sharing of my information, including sales of my information and ownership of my posts, intellectual rights, etc, and I do not agree to the terms.

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[Alan Petersen]

Amazon pays royalties 60 days out, I would think that's more than enough time for them to get busted, banned, and payment withheld (as long they're reported to Amazon).

 

[Atlantisatheart]

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Content removed due to new owners; VerticalScope Inc. TOS Change of 2018. I received no notification of a change to TOS, was never asked to agree to their data mining or sharing of my information, including sales of my information and ownership of my posts, intellectual rights, etc, and I do not agree to the terms.

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[555aaa]

That donkey's lazy. The champion donkey is at 106 and number 6 just behind Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix in bestsellers childrens lit.

Hah. My donkey's up to 96. There goes my theory about staying below the top 100.

 

[H.C.]

Donkey and Meadow is just a misunderstood literary work. Sure, its message is repetetive but isn't it a message that we need to hear? I, for one welcome the message. 

 

[......~......]

I hope they hit #1 in the paid store! Just for the lolz! 

 

[Gator]

The 10 BotMobile riders are currently at sales ranks #75 to #86.  It takes about 1,100 to 1,200 borrows to reach those ranks in a day.  Bet the scammer has more borrows coming, huh?

 

[Gentleman Zombie]

#128-138 now. One of the ones pulled made it to #127 early this morning (CT).

Another thought: They could be autoset for 1000 *sales/reads* each. That would keep them just outside the Top 100. And it may not have been Amazon that even pulled the earlier ones. As soon as all 1000 copies were *bought and read*, the scammer may have been the one to pull them. $14 X 1000 = $14,000 per book. The 10 books that are up right now = at least $140,000 in profit assuming the books are being bot read or click-farm read. That's a pretty good day's take. No need really to keep them up beyond that point.

You know what? I believe you are right. That's exactly what's happening.

Well, there are now 10 of these in the top 100 for the Amazon store overall. That's 10% of the top 100 Best Sellers list- spots that should go to legitimate authors, not scammers. So the big question is - will Amazon pay these guys out? And of course, we're only seeing the most aggressive scammers at work here. I;m sure there are others quietly making a pretty penny that we'll never notice.

 

[BellaJames]

Sorry I just don't understand how these people are making money.
I read the article on David Gaughrans site /KU Scammers Attack Amazon's Free Ebook Charts but that's about the free chart. How are they making money on a book priced at $9.99

 

[bobfrost]

The coordination involved here is stunning. More than a thousand KU accounts mass borrowing and presumably paging through these books?

Just on these 11 titles, that's 11,000 books borrowed and read through in a 48 hour period.

That's four books per minute for 48 hours straight.

I'm assuming this is an automated operation, but that's also incredible. How on earth did one person coordinate setting up a thousand KU accounts? How did they handle payment etc for a thousand accounts?

This isn't something that came out of nowhere. This must have been going on at a smaller scale for awhile for the person to build to this level.

 

[bobfrost]

Sorry I just don't understand how these people are making money.
I read the article on David Gaughrans site /KU Scammers Attack Amazon's Free Ebook Charts but that's about the free chart. How are they making money on a book priced at $9.99

The books are in kindle unlimited.

They are borrowing each title a thousand times. Each book is 3000 kenpc of baloney. That's 15$ every borrow and full read.

They are making $15,000 on each title in 24 hours. You are looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in just those 11 titles in the top 100.

Somehow, this person has managed to create a thousand KU accounts and is actively coordinating them to mass read pages of their KU titles. The scale of this scam is staggering.

They aren't buying the books at all.

 

[......~......]

I'm assuming this is an automated operation, but that's also incredible. How on earth did one person coordinate setting up a thousand KU accounts? How did they handle payment etc for a thousand accounts?

I'm assuming they're getting the 30-day free trial?

And they're probably using prepaid cards.

 

[Gentleman Zombie]

Remember that big Russian scammer caught a few months ago?  He and his buddies made over 3 million dollars! They created a database of over 83,899 fake Amazon accounts that he used to publish and borrow his own books. They got away with it for two years!

AFAIK Amazon still doesn't verify email addresses and gives away 30-day free trial KU memberships like candy.  Again, with no real security checks or verification at all.

So this scam literally costs nothing more than computer networking & programming expertise.  A first year computer sci student can pull it off from the comfort of her dorm room.

 

[Gator]

The coordination involved here is stunning. More than a thousand KU accounts mass borrowing and presumably paging through these books?

Just on these 11 titles, that's 11,000 books borrowed and read through in a 48 hour period.

That's four books per minute for 48 hours straight.

I'm assuming this is an automated operation, but that's also incredible. How on earth did one person coordinate setting up a thousand KU accounts? How did they handle payment etc for a thousand accounts?

This isn't something that came out of nowhere. This must have been going on at a smaller scale for awhile for the person to build to this level.

It's actually 50 different titles we've seen the scammer use to pull off this scam just this weekend alone. And since he's got 10 slots in the sales ranks of #67 to #77, that's about 1,200 to 1,300 BotMobile borrows so far. I'll bet he has even more bots to borrow his books, though.

10 titles * 1,300 borrowed books * $15 in page reads per book = $195,000

(Plus whatever he made on the other 40 titles that were taken down earlier.)

Even if he didn't use the free 30-day KU trial for each of those accounts, that would only cost him $12,987 in monthly KU fees. Nice, tidy profit, eh?

I *think* Amazon will put a stop to this, but perhaps that's wishful thinking.