Anatomy of KU Scams – Untangling the Knots

Since my post regarding KU Scammers hit, I’ve been been trying to answer the inevitable questions and peek at the various discussions. I’m seeing a lot of folks conflating the scams. By conflating the scam elements, people wind up…inevitably…either not seeing how they work or thinking it must be a small problem.

I’ve decided to open up the research I’ve done over the past months and show you what I’ve found. While I focused intently on “closed loop” scams, which are clearly against Amazon’s TOS, I did research all the others I could find that had any sort of traction on KDP.

Once again, this will be another wall of text (and pictures!) so will likely only interest those impacted significantly.

Here we go!

The Flowchart – The image above (click to embiggen) is my flowchart. That’s just the summary one, because I’ve been making them for each of the scam types I’ve researched, and included individual titles, authors, and a whole slew of information I can’t share here without getting sued. I’m listing those summary elements with some additional info.

• – Actor: Real Author
• – Target: Readers in KU
• – Method: Engage Reader Sympathy or Call to Action
• – Skeeze Level: Desperate Author to Embarrassed Cheater
• – TOS Status: Questionable, but not specifically against TOS
• – Primary Element: Links to the back of the books
• – Enhancements: May use targeted advertising (which is legit)

1) Ask Method – Message readers inside the opening of the book asking them to click a link to the back because Amazon is only paying them by the page read.

2) Big Ask Method – Send out a newsletter to all fans asking them to check out each of the author’s books and click to the back, because Amazon has stripped them of earnings and pays by the page read.

3) Little Trick Method – Link in front that claims to have an important message that sends reader to the back of the book. Message may be real or simply standard end of book message.

• – Actor: Real Author
• – Target: Readers in KU
• – Method: Trick Reader
• – Skeeze Level: Cheater to Skeezeball
• – TOS Status: Questionable to directly against TOS
• – Primary Element: Links to the back of very inflated books, inducements to get them to click such as prizes or bonus content
• – Enhancements: May use targeted advertising (which is legit) or click groups to all click each other and give payouts.
• – Of interest: Seen frequently using short, slapped together shorts of erotica or erom that flooded KU 1.0 in order to get a flat payout, which was the same for a novel as a 10 page short.

1) Bundle Me Method – Author bundles together large numbers of shorts, which is legit and often done for serials. In this scenario, the click bait links are what make it sketchy. The links often promised entry for very desirable prizes or bonus content in order to get clicks to the back of the book. See images after this section for examples.

2) Bundle Me Again Method – Same as 1) except the author bundles the same groups of stories over and over in a different order. The purpose is to appeal to more readers (kink, fetish, BDSM, etc) by changing covers, titles, and blurb to cover a larger range of readers. The content is exactly the same in each bundle. Frequently the Table of Contents (TOC) is given a prominent link and the story advertised is actually in the back of the book in order to trigger a full read.

3) Babel Bundle – Author creates Google Translate or Babelfish versions of a single story for a large number of languages. Then author ensures that the language covered by that market is in the back (English in US, for example). Most likely alternate languages for a market are nearest the back (Spanish, for example). The reader then must click the TOC in the front (note that Amazon’s requirement for a TOC in the front actually helps this scam) to get to the English version, triggering a full read of a book filled with 25 or more bad translations.

4) Break Book or Bundle – Between each chapter or story, put in a link that says “click to keep reading” that takes the reader to the back of the book. Frequently found paired with large amounts of unrelated content between that link and the story at the back in order to pad the book size.

Pictures! Yay!

Here are some pictures of what the above tricks looks like inside a book. It’s pretty ugly and this particular book was reported extensively. It is still for sale…only now without all these inducements in the front.

Now on to the next category – the Non-Author versions.

• – Actor: Non-Author Entrepeneur
• – Target: Readers in KU
• – Method: Trick Reader
• – Skeeze Level: Skeezeball
• – TOS Status: Questionable to directly against TOS
• – Primary Element: Links to the back of very inflated books, inducements to get them to click such as prizes or bonus content
• – Enhancements: May use click groups to all click each other and give payouts.  May utilize click farms.
• – Of interest: This scam is having issues since it relies on readers and takes time without a click farm. Some have made All Star Bonuses, which was bad since it got them caught.

Same as Author versions above with the following exceptions:

•  – Fiction: May hire ghostwriters (some overseas, others US via freelancer sites or Fiverr ) to create books. These can wind up being web translations of foreign works, out of print short porn books from a few decades ago, plagiarized works that have the words changed (ex: heave changed to surge). Most of them are simply egregiously bad.
•  – Non-Fiction: May hire scrapers who cobble together stuff from the web, wikipedia, investopedia, or other freely available info.
•  – Study Guides – May hire or cobble together web articles about a famous book, package it so that it looks like the famous book, then get a click farm to bring it up in the ranks. Readers mistake it for the actual book, see it’s cheaper (or in KU since many huge new hits aren’t), and get taken in.
•  – Many will be listed as “award winning authors” but their awards might actually be simply an attendance award from third grade or something. None are award winning in the way that actually applies to the work in question.
•  – More likely to use specious advertising (including Amazon advertising!), click farms, and click cooperatives in order to drive up the rank and be noticed by more readers who think it must be awesome if it’s ranked that high.
•  – Will often price books higher than average (9.99 for example) in order to drive away buyers and lure KU readers in more. KU readers will feel like they got a huge bargain since they pay nothing and scammers know that the lure of a good deal will draw them.
•  – Text Salad – Some will pad the book with an enormous word salad in between two halves of the story and put a link in that says to click to continue the story, triggering a huge payout. (This one is having more trouble lately since people are catching on and the books aren’t good enough to make them want to click).

The above scams rely on long periods being available for sale. For each day on sale, the chances of getting caught and the book taken down by Amazon increase. That would mean they might not get payment.

• – Actor: Non-Author Scammer
• – Target: Amazon KU Pot
• – Method: Closed Loop Click Farming/Click Cooperative
• – Skeeze Level: Skeezeball Extraordinaire (Don’t touch them without gloves!)
• – TOS Status: Directly against TOS
• – Primary Element: Text often makes no sense.  Short duration sales often driven at off-times for KDP Customer Support to avoid rapid response to consumer complaints.
• – Enhancements: Uses multiple EINs to mitigate risk to funds. May immediately use free days as a way to avoid rising in rank on the paid lists, which would draw attention faster. Don’t bother with reviews because they don’t want KU readers to look at the books.
• – Notes: The scammers have ZERO intention of engaging readers and want to avoid them at all costs. These scammers do *not* want to earn the All-Star bonus because it draws attention. Will usually make sure that there is a different author name on each book to ensure that. (Details in my previous post, no need to repeat).

1) Normal Sized Salad Method – The books may have a few pages of real (and really bad) text at the beginning, but will be filled with word salad after that. Because it would be simpler to flag books that approach 3000 pages, they create normal to large sized books that don’t go over 1K pages. Click farms or click cooperatives do the borrowing, flip to the back, immediately return. Book gets taken down immediately after all clicks bought to avoid getting caught. Account is left open only to collect payment. Example word salad images in previous post.

2) Extra Large Salad Method – My example in the original KU Scammer post is one such book. Word salad, click farms or click cooperatives. Again, take it down fast so readers don’t see and report it. Making it free will mean that book hoarders rather than KU readers will find it, if anyone does at all. Kindle stuffers don’t usually read the new downloads immediately.

3) What Did I Just Read Method – Example in Images 7 and 8. Very odd text. Sentences, but very strange ones. Same procedure as Salad for earning.

Here are some fresh off the Kindle Direct Platform (and approved for sale by Amazon with their oh-so-wonderful screening processes) examples.

 

UPDATE: I found where this book was plagiarized from! I even found the exact page from my screen capture. You can find the original unsynomized version here at http://fiction.homepageofthedead.com/forum.pl?readfiction=790H&rdp=25

Here’s another beauty…with an interesting capture page.

So, I could go on all day, but don’t we all think this is just about enough wall of text? I hope this clears up some of the scam-fusion out there. It does show that it’s pervasive, varied, ongoing, nutso, and Amazon is just letting new word salads slide right into publication.

Shining a big light on this is the only way to urge a fix, but those fixes will need to be aggressive and ultimately change the way KDP processes books.

For fun, maybe those of you who find scam books can post them here in the comments? I’d like to see how many can be found (without me doing it). Cheers!