I had the same with Verizon after someone opened a wireless account in my name. After supplying all the documentation they asked for, they came back to me, "our investigation believes the account was not opened fraudulently" (i.e. that they were saying that the account, and credit tradeline, were in fact mine).
"So what documents did I use to open this account?" "We can't tell you, for privacy reasons." "Did you verify my identity at the start of this call?" "Yes." "And you're saying your investigation believes that I opened the account." "Yes." "So I can't see my own documents in order to protect my privacy?" "Well... in case the account isn't yours... umm, ahh..." "..." "..."
Last summer I get a teams message from my manager "Call me ASAP" uhhh, crap, what did I do wrong.
HR had received an attempt to verify my unemployment claim. Uh, er, what? Apparently, like millions of other Americans this past summer, I was one of the people that someone tried to fraudulently collect unemployment benefits on.
I contacted the unemployment office her and reported it, a day or so later got a form email back stating this was happening like crazy and I needed to take no further action.
>our investigation believes the account was not opened fraudulently" (i.e. that they were saying that the account, and credit tradeline, were in fact mine).
This is an ongoing fear of mine. That come tax time they're going to be like "whoa, you owe all these taxes on the thousands of unemployment income you were paid" and I'll be like "uhhhhhhhh, no?"
G.J. Blokdijk is the 'author' of thousands of medical titles: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&fie...
Gerardus Blokdijk gets more than 40,000 hits for computer-related titles apparently generated by template: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Gerardus+Blokdyk&i=stripbooks&ref...
These titles are created by an IT company that is selling software / services. The software appears to do platform price matching / analytics, and one of those is on Amazon.
My understanding / assumption is that it appears that if they are a high frequency sellerid paired to their developerid, then they can increase their requests per second (http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/dev_guide/DG_...) either by requesting a change, or maybe via background quotas set by Amazon.
The IT company has some promotional stuff, and they indicate a number of VM's using multiple public IPs to avoid throttling, and in addition:
> [as a top seller we get 8 rp/s, instead of the newbie 0.5 rp/s against 20 items per request]
I went through some of the sellers, and noted some have some complete shite ratings, but that their ratings are consistently at a certain value even over 30/90/12 months. Lifetime values are highly skewed as it appears they pre-stuffed the hat. So for every real person that gets screwed by a cancelled order, they create a number of fake reviews.
So my conclusion based on what I see is that this is their place-holder author, each of the clients they've sold this to has a store front stocked with these titles, the clients generate a ton of fake sales at a reduced price, request a quota increase as "we're a large seller", and then happily do whatever system gaming they actually intended to do.
I could go further down this rabbit hole, but this hypothesis has been exhausted. I wish I was this interested in my actual job.
The business titles in the second SERP look similar -- they're poorly formatted scoring systems or checklists.
So yeah. Those books look "legitimate" inasmuch as they are at least intended to be bought by real people believing that they are useful, rather than as a means of money laundering. The content of the books is heavily templated to the point of making the books not worth their selling price, but that's a separate issue.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cyrus-IMAP-Server-Complete-Guide-eb...
I found the full text elsewhere and it's basically 215+ pages of boilerplate/generated questions with blank answers to fill in. Complete nonsense. It's not only sold on Amazon, but on several other otherwise-not-that-dodgy sites as well.
The author even has an Australia-based business selling "licenses", "certifications", "professional development" etc. Blokdijk/Blokdyk (he spells his name inconsistently) looks like a typical conman with a small number of Schroedinger accomplices and blindsided useful idiots.
I get the vibe that if you sign up with them, you end up as a "consultant"/"affiliate"/"coach" spending your time acquiring new nodes in the network... Maybe there's a scammy MLM-component, maybe not, it's not spelled out, but I've seen that before even when it's not obvious from anything public.
I'd be surprised if their business would hold up to legal scrutiny.
And given that, who are these purchasers of his books on Amazon, then? I can't imagine anyone genuinely buying this and not asking for a refund. Is it just him buying from himself to boost his image, or are they that good at selling snake-oil?
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Then take a look at this, one of the top results I got when searching (warning, scam and probably contains malware): https://iv.0li.ru/books_db/?q=OFdIalBBN1dvcU1DbThiNTJIOVp0YS...
This is the most clever piracy-scam site I've seen. Note how the title is generated from the query and post dates are dynamically set so the earliest is old while the most recent is yesterday.
It's quite poetic how these assisted auto-content generating scams are chaining on to each other (:
Ok, so to pull this of, you need to:
1. have one or more stolen credit cards (obviously not on your name)
2. sell a book under a false name and buy it with the stolen credit card
3. have a bank account somewhere either under the false name from 2. or under some other false name or with a bank that will never give out your real name
So the money is not "clean" because it now rests inside a bank account with a false name or a bank that does not cooperate with authorities. In any case it is still somewhat shady.
>2. sell a book under a false name and buy it with the stolen credit card
That probably won't work too well because you'll have a unusually high chargeback rate on your account which would lead to your account getting flagged. You also eat the charge of chargebacks so that will eat into your profits. This could work as a part of a larger money laundering scheme though. eg. you have cash from selling drugs and you want to clean them, so you buy amazon gift cards with it and then use them to buy your ebook. now you have a clean source of income (selling ebooks) that the IRS would be satisfied with.
I'm guessing they are using the identify of "real" authors to bypass some kind of check Amazon has on new accounts selling books from unknown authors. Otherwise, what you're saying makes sense.
Amazon is an Everything store, including more easily washed financial products like gift cards that companies normally avoid for these reasons. I bet they can use their proceeds to exchange for these.
I am curious if, by having a linked AWS account fueled by these, if there is a way to fully wash. E.g., bitcoin mining sets a super lossy floor.
(We do graph analytics, where mining webs of transactions & their meta data is super interesting. Funny behaviors like these pop out as weird and extreme looking topologies when looking at them :)
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amazon+gift+c...
My only logic is that its a form of money laundering.
These days though, I just torrent more often than not. It's just too much work trying to pay for the content I like.
That doesn't really make sense. Why buy it online leaving a papertrail (ebay account, bank/credit card transactions), when you can buy it anonymously in person using cash? The daily volume also isn't there. It's a couple thousand dollars per day at most. You can easily get that amount in person without raising any suspicion by driving to different stores in your city.
You set up a bank account and amazon seller account you control in someone else's name. Then you use your stolen CCs to buy the "book" from yourself thereby converting credit card details into money in an account you control. From there you can get the money out in a multitude of ways (or launder it again through the same or another method) depending on your risk tolerance.
We just keep going back and forward between you and I, always getting the $1k Credit Card sign up bonuses and a TON of points each month.
But this also a good way to launder money, most often for low-level drug transactions. Drug addicts steal credit cards or pass bad checks to buy gift cards. Then either give the cards to a dealer directly, or to a broker. The broker gives them cash, which they take to the dealer.
Gift cards are always cheaper than face value. The basic economics tells you they can't be more expensive than that, since they are similar to money, but worse. They can easily be cheaper; $300 at Starbucks is not as good as $200 wherever you want.
Your incredulity is pretty shocking; if you want to see gift cards sold cheaper than face value, all you need to do is walk into a Costco.
Remember Amazon has the credit card fee margin of savings if someone uses a gift card instead of a credit card.
I know, $5 isn't much, but it is still lower than face value.
The store issuing the gift card is out of the town center and I have had it for ages. Make me an offer and, if I get enough booze or contraband for now/tonight then I am happy.
Buy gift cards with a stolen credit card
Sell the gift cards for cheap to random people on the internet for crypto
They most likely already had his information.
In many countries it’s difficult to request refunds for online payments, especially if it was clear what you were buying. There’s a look inside button you can use to see a large selection of pages.
He generated so many books probably to cover all kinds of tech topics, to reach more victims.
Not sure why this idea gets downvoted. The simpler explanation is usually right.
> Why All My Books Are Now Free (aka A Lesson in Amazon Scams and Money Laundering)
https://mebfaber.com/2018/04/18/how-to-launder-money-with-am...
1. it's a large trusted platform, so the victim's bank is less likely to freeze the transactions
2. multiple items with arbitrary pricing means maxing out each card is simpler
3. the platform will likely have to eat the charge-backs, so where ever the seller receives money from Amazon is relatively safe for a while to further convert into crypto or whatever
4. because of the size of the platform you can keep creating new accounts indefinitely - they cannot possibly vet all new sellers - this is probably where the stolen identities for authors come in. Amazon must be doing some basic sanity checks / credit score lookups or something similar - hence they need real peoples names / SSNs.
I've seen similar things on app stores / freelancer sites etc. Yes, the accounts get flagged after a while, but there's usually enough time to cash out and creating a new one isn't that hard.
It would be possible to launder with a similar setup - just not with stolen cards but with prepaid cash/crypto ones so amazon doesn't flag the account for charge-backs. But then there's no real need to steal the book author's identity. You could just put your own name or a pseudonym on it. For a 1099 to arrive they've clearly entered the stolen SSN somewhere. You'd want your own SSN there to prove to the IRS that you've made the money... (and then you'd want to pay the taxes).
