Amazon Unintentionally Paying Scammers

[HardOCP News]

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, if scammers put this much energy into a real job, they'd be millionaires by now. It makes me wonder how these guys aren't easily caught though. You have to have a real bank account for Amazon to place payments in and someone had to open that account. Right?

Amazon created Kindle Unlimited, a Netflix for books, that’s delivering indie authors revenue and readers. But it turns out that the way it works may have created an opportunity for scammers to steal earnings from real writers producing genuine works. On the bright side, Amazon isn’t spying on Kindle users as they read. That’s a tiny bit of good news in the discouraging tale about hacking a monthly pool of a few million dollars that means a lot to e-book writers but works out to small change for a company that broke $100 billion in revenue for the first time last year.

 

[Spidey329]

It's not that complex of a scam. They fill the books with tons of pages, even multiple translations, and then put a link in the front that jumps the reader to a page near the back.

Amazon pays the Amazon Unlimited pool based on pages read, however they don't actually calculate whether you read the book or not, they base it off the last read page so if you click a link at the beginning (or a script does it) that jumps you to pg. 300, you're credited for all those pages.

I noticed that a lot of books on Amazon are now just people taking their blog posts and compiling them into a document then calling it a book.

 

[w4ffles]

That's some really lazy software design. They took the easy way out and now they're literally paying for it.