How serious?Įven if that momentum is maintained over a few days for each ebook, each little boost adds up. Once the free download period had expired, the books would be free for purchase by any unwitting dupe hoping to educate themself with a readable text on esoterica, only to realize they had been scammed.Īnd while subsequent complaints from buyers would be enough to suspend or shut down the publisher account, the time window is enough to make some serious dough. This would inflate the e-books’ sales ranks and push them into spots of higher visibility on Amazon’s extremely niche category lists. All of this took place without any money changing hands. Here’s how it worked: first, Shershnyov created thousands of fake email accounts to publish the fake e-books and collect royalties. He would then briefly offer the e-books up for free, loosing more fake email accounts-which he routed through proxy servers to further evade detection-to download the e-books. The database contains information about 1,453 e-books, all on various esoteric topics (everything from homesteading to herbal remedies to understanding body language), and all described as “littered with spelling and grammatical mistakes.” The way Shershnyov made his money isn’t unfamiliar to anyone who’s seen The Wolf Of Wall Street or committed financial crimes it’s essentially a “pump and dump” scheme. These addresses and other data on the fake e-books were discovered on the aforementioned unprotected server by the MacKeeper Security Research Center, and paint a fairly risible picture of Amazon’s security protocols. Shershnyov was able to avoid detection by judiciously employing an army of sockpuppet email addresses - so many that their sheer numbers outpaced Amazon’s attempts to shut them down. He forgot to put a password on his server. What eventually gave him away weren’t customer complaints or even getting caught by the bookseller. Shershnyov was able to stay in Amazon’s shadows for two years by using his scam server conservatively so as to not raise any red flags. Until now, nobody has been able to look inside at how one of these scams work - especially one that’s been so prolific, generating millions of dollars in royalties by cashing in on unwitting buyers who are tricked into thinking these ebooks have some substance. Some scammers buy fake reviews, while others will try other ways to game the system. Zach Whittaker details how Shershnyov pulled it off over at ZDNet:Ĭatfishing isn’t new - it’s been well documented. Which is exactly what Valeriy Shershnyov did, racking up millions of dollars in profit by publishing trash e-books on Amazon and gaming the site’s algorithm to sucker consumers into buying them. Big house publishing and most bookstores rely on gargantuan sales from a handful of tentpole books to keep the lights on, but you can always take the opposite tack: instead of selling a lot of a few, try selling a few of a lot! Unfortunately, that’s really hard to do - unless you cheat. The secret to getting rich in the bookselling business is to sell lots of books. If you bought this, you got conned, but that’s kind of on you.
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