It’s a day just like any other. The sun is shining, birds are singing. A neighbor calls a cheerful greeting as Mom and Dad see the kids off to school. Then, from across the street, a scream splits the air.
A young mother flings her phone away and presses her children back from the menace on the screen. A teenage boy yells, his phone clattering to the sidewalk as he scrambles away. From the windows of homes all up and down the street come cries of horror at the foul abominations leering through computer screens.
Zombie scammers are shambling through Amazon’s Kindle store!!!
Meanwhile, in a dusty attic room, a writer hunches over her laptop, a pencil clenched in her teeth. The screen’s blue glow bathes her determined face, illuminates her tangled hair and rumpled clothes as she pursues the hideous truth through the darkest catacombs of the internet . . .
The once-green gardens of the Kindle store have been blighted with scam books. Lured by promises of free Kindles and Amazon gift cards, innocent readers are ensnared, their precious time devoured by blank pages, lists of numbers, Google translations of vile prose. The books of hard-working writers are terrifyingly, gruesomely buried alive under page after page of BBW Paranormal Pregnancy Billionaire Alpha Bear Shifter Satisfies Girls Every Desire Menage Romance.
What can be the purpose of the scammers’ perverted plot?
MONEY! Truckloads of money leached from the blood, sweat and tears of honest writers. Money squeezed from precious minutes of leisure time of unsuspecting readers. For each time they click a CLICK HERE! message, pure, gleaming gold flows into the scammers’ greedy pockets.
It can’t be! you say. But it is. Read the words of the famous, well-respected watchdog of indie publishing, David Gaughran.
Oh! you say. But surely it can’t work. But the scammers are diabolically clever in their relentless search for ill-gotten gains. Read author Ann Christie’s step-by-step breakdown of how they do it.
As the money continues to flow, the scammers grow ever more cunning, overrunning the Kindle store. Amazon tried to stop them, but they only rose again, more hideous and malignant than ever. Authors have reported them, but still they come, an endless, disgusting tide.
What will they do next? What horrors will they perpetrate in their insatiable lust for lucre? Will they be defeated before they drain the life from every real book?
Stay tuned…