Writer Beware: Clickfarm Scam Exposed on Amazon
Last week was a rather embarrassing week in the world of authors. A scammer with a pretty low quality book managed to rank #1 in the US Amazon Store and no not #1 in a category, number 1 in the entire kindle store. At first I was upset because this book was released last years and only had 15 reviews. However despite that it managed to make it to number 1. Authors such as myself grew suspicious rather quickly finding it hard to believe that a no-name author could jump up to #1 from #385,000 in the kindle store. An author asked him what was his secret and the "Scammer" replied that he had friends in very high places, sure he did! At first I was rather upset, almost questioning my will to write anymore because I felt that I could just write crap and achieve more. What really ticked me off was how the author scammed his way up, let the picture speak for itself...
Anybody with an IQ higher than 70 should know what this is, but in case you don't I'll tell you. These phones on the counter are being used in a click fraud known as a clickfarm. Basically clickfarms are used by cheaters who pay people usually residing in India, Nigeria, China and the Philippines to click on their page or in this case their book up to 1,000 times to boost up their rankings in the kindle store. So sure, 1,000 downloads at the same time will be enough to skyrocket a book close to #1 if not #1. You might say what's the crime here? Well the crime here is that us legit authors lose visibility for our books or lose our "fair" chance to be viewed in the Amazon charts. Another crime is that these books are robbing us authors of the Kindle Unlimited pot that we get paid from every month. Amazon claims that they have to drop the funding because they are running out of money, well Amazon maybe you should focus on the problem in front of you!
Yet another crime that is being committed is being done on the readers who rely on the top 100 charts to look for what are supposed to be the best books out there. Then to come out angry and disappointed that the is crap and clearly cheated its way up to the top. What Amazon has to realize is that this scam could ruin customer confidence and get to a point where certain people will refuse to purchase books because they don't trust that book is any good. What's even more shocking is that these "clickfarm" services are being offered at a legit website that authors know very well, yet they continue to fly under the radar.
Fiverr, yeah that author website and freelancer website. I did a little digging in as I heard that you can get these "deceitful" services for a small fee by other authors. It's not that I didn't believe them, I just wanted to see them for myself with my own eyes. To my shock, I didn't have to look too long to find the suspect. Now I will not share the link as I will not give the temptation for anyone to try this on my account. It promises you 150 "traffic" to your books for $15, the only thing is that "traffic" is fake. A Click farm exposed right there, yet many people have reported them to Amazon and guess what...
I'm waiting... If you said nothing, you're absolutely correct! The person is still freely selling this service and unethical authors are still free to get the service to cheat their way to the top. It's sad, really it is. The only good thing is that the book that cheated its way to the top did get its ranking removed by Amazon. However the fact the book is still on sale provides very little in the way of justice.
So what should happen, I'll tell you what should happen. Anyone caught using clickfarms should have their account banned, but also be charged with a crime. They should be charged with fraud. I feel that once you get the law involved the scammers will run the other way and this crap will stop. I'm not talking about a misdemeanor, I'm talking felony charges where the person can rot in jail, it's how upset I am about the lack or a response on this topic.
The caveat is that Amazon could start targeting legit authors and they could get in trouble despite their rankings going up the right way. So it's a double edged sword. More enforcement, but the real authors could be targeted as Amazon might go way too far. I've talked to many authors and they said that the law needs to be involved to combat this scandal.
The fact that clickfarms are "Legal" but unethical could be the end of reading and writing as we know it. Amazon could soon turn into a world full of craptastic books and none of us want that!