Amazon has a fair proportion of issues with scammers. Most of us have most likely come through suspicious-looking knock-offs, or merchandise at costs that look too good to be true – don’t get us began on microSD card scams – however, the newest racket to be uncovered is one thing somewhat completely different.
Authors have reported that the covers and paintings of their books have been pirated, and used because the covers for notebooks are then handed off as the unique guide, full of the creator’s identity, however with the content material changed by clean pages.
We had been alerted to the rip-off after we got here through a thread on Twitter begun by creator Rob Manuel detailing his current expertise. Manuel noticed a clone of his guide The Very Better of Fesshole: Britain Confesses Anonymously around 24 hours after it was revealed on Amazon. This cloned guide was listed at a less expensive worth than Manuel’s unique by a ‘creator’ going by the identity of ‘Rachid Zrika’.
Manuel found that ‘Rachid Zrika’ had a web page on Amazon – it’s now been taken down – that includes a handful of books below that identify that had been very clearly cloned. Books on Amazon’s bestseller lists, together with Cat Woman by Daybreak O’Porter and a Ballet of Lepers by Leonard Cohen, had been each listed as being written by and out there from ‘Zrika’, and had been being bought at a fraction of the value of the originals.
Manuel ordered a duplicate of the pretend model of his guide and shared a video of what he obtained.
Whereas this pretends ‘author’ is just not promoting precise copies of those books, they’re passing off what are nothing greater than low-cost notebooks as unique works – and anybody who unsuspectingly bought one, whether or not for themselves or as a present, can be paying good cash for what’s – virtually actually – a hole facade of the real article.
We reached out to Rob Manuel, who informed us that Amazon had deleted the clone of his guide after he made “a little bit of a fuss on Twitter”. He added: “I used to be apprehensive that it would begin showing within the bestseller lists because it’s cheaper than the actual guide, so folks trying casually would select a budget one. And people folks can be disenchanted with a garbage pocketbook.”
One other author replied to Manuel’s Twitter thread to say that the identical factor had occurred to him, and added that when he reached out to Amazon UK for the assistance he was given no help as a result of he “was solely the creator, and never VAT registered”.
The verified Amazon account @amazonhelp then replied within the thread and included a hyperlink to a web page the place authors may report any infringement – however that was the extent of Amazon’s response. We requested Manuel if he’d obtained any direct communications from anybody at Amazon, and surprisingly he had not, though Amazon did a minimum of take down the fraudulent ‘Rachid Zrika’ web page.
We don’t know the way widespread this difficulty is, nevertheless it wouldn’t be shocking if different scammers are doing one thing just like ‘Rachid Zrika’, and had their very own pretend creator pages.
We reached out to Amazon for a remark, and a spokesperson informed us: “Nothing is extra essential to us than buyer and creator belief and making certain titles are genuine. We have now zero tolerance for plagiarised titles or content material, and we put money into folks and know-how to guard our retailer from abuse. The merchandise flagged has been eliminated.”
Evaluation: do higher, Amazon
Scams similar to this one are all the time troubling, and much more so right now of yr, within the run-up to Black Friday and the pre-Christmas purchasing season. Within the rush to snap up a cut price, consumers don’t all the time cease to examine the small print, and may simply be taken benefit of and discover themselves out of pocket.
Provided that Amazon began life as a bookseller, it’s not unreasonable to anticipate that if you’re searching for books try to be getting precisely what you’ve paid for. And whereas it’s reassuring that Amazon has acted swiftly on this case, it’s additionally troubling that it solely did so when the matter was dropped at its consideration – who is aware of what number of unsuspecting consumers have already fallen sufferer to this specific rip-off, or comparable ones.
The standard recommendation applies if you’re purchasing online: no matter what you’re in search of, do your analysis, examine the small print, and be cautious of any Black Friday offers that look too good to be true.
