Amazon's Hall of Spinning Knives - David Gaughran

Six days to Halloween.

Panzer's trip into the Catosphere today took him to David Gaughran's blog. With a little digging he discovered a post about Amazon's fraud detection system.

According to David Gaughran's post, Amazon's fraud detection system has been catching some innocent authors. The system is designed to identify authors who use clickfarms/bots to increase the sales numbers of their books. Most of the authors' books mentioned in the post were in free promotions, so the "sales" were free downloads. As a result of the fraud detection system, the authors' books were rank-stripped. The authors were also warned their accounts were eligible for shut down if another infraction was detected. The post describes two possible reasons for the authors' books being flagged.  One is there's a problem with Amazon's fraud detection system itself or the second is the authors may have been targeted by scammers.The authors targeted even included New York Times bestselling authors.

Panzer says, "Umm ... It appears Amazon uses bots to answer authors emails, so you can't even ask what's happening."

Note: This is a v-e-r-y l-o-n-g post. Bring a thermos of tea and a half dozen muffins and three chocolate chip cookies (biscuits) for today's reading selection.

To read the post, tootle over to Amazon