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Today I've read a German article on book-scam on Amazon. I already knew about fake comments and reviews and that there is an industry behind. However, "Kindle Direct Publishing" (KDP) seems to be the perfect ecosystem for fraud. That's very bad news to me since I was thinking of potentially publishing my future book on PIM with KDP.
With the ability to publish your own books, people found out that they may publish vast amounts of re-published, stolen or badly written books with new shiny covers. People do advertise that they make up to 9500€ per month while doing a normal job at the same time.
Generating a large number of highly ranked reviews is one of the pillars. ReviewMeta.com - Amazon Review Checker is a tool that is able to detect some of those foul reviews. Here is one example from the article which illustrates how ReviewMeta is analyzing the fake reviews.
One of the tricks of those scammers is to choose a non-popular book category. This way, you can easily get the bestseller status, pushing your book even further.
Of course, biographies of the fake authors are not checked by anybody. This way, scammers can come up with all kinds of trustworthy looking fictitious people.
If somebody writes an honest but negative comment, standard letters with (empty) legal threats are sent out so that the majority of users to delete their negative comments.
According to the article, Amazon is not actively trying to stop this scam model as a whole. They even cooperate by giving the scammers the personal details of the writers of negative comments so that they are able to send those threat-letters to them.
I have to say that I personally try to minimize my usage of Amazon for buying stuff, especially for books. I was using Amazon for product reviews. If this scam model gets more popular, the last reason to use Amazon will be obsolete for me. That company is turning more and more to one of our greatest problems in our society.