Amazon has its fair share of problems with scammers. Most of us have probably come across suspicious-looking knock-offs, or products at prices that look too good to be true – don’t get us started on a microSD card scams – but the latest racket to be exposed is something rather different.
Authors have reported that the covers and artwork of their books have been pirated, and used as the covers for notebooks that are then passed off as the original book, complete with the author’s name, but with the content replaced by blank pages.
We were alerted to the scam when we came across a thread on Twitter started by author Rob Manuel detailing his recent experience. Manuel spotted a clone of his book The Very Best of Fesshole: Britain Confesses Anonymously around 24 hours after it was published on Amazon. This cloned book was listed at a cheaper price than Manuel’s original by an ‘author’ going by the name of ‘Rachid Zrika’.
What an odd thing. My book we published yesterday has been cloned on Amazon. OF COURSE I’VE ORDERED IT. Can’t wait to read Rachid Zrika’s version. pic.twitter.com/iN4LIxR4r8October 28, 2022
Manuel discovered that ‘Rachid Zrika’ had a page on Amazon – it’s now been taken down – featuring a handful of books under that name that were very obviously cloned. Books on Amazon’s bestseller lists, including Cat Lady by Dawn O’Porter and a Ballet of Lepers by Leonard Cohen, were both listed as being written by and available from…
