New Amazon scam

[Bramblethorn]

An author with a few books on Amazon was rather surprised to get a 1099 telling him he'd made $24k selling books. Looks like it's a money-laundering scam: somebody has gotten hold of his details including SSN, published junk "books" priced at hundreds of dollars apiece, and then bought them using stolen credit cards with the money going to their bank accounts.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/money-laundering-via-author-impersonation-on-amazon/

Every so often we have a discussion here about whether Literotica should provide ways for authors to get paid for their work on this site. This sort of thing is why I'm against the idea - as soon as money starts changing hands, you start drawing crooks looking for ways to exploit the system.

 

[KindofHere]

..................

 

[HisArpy]

First off, I don't mind publishing here for free. I can write and test styles and tropes and not worry about how it affect my offsite work.

But not every literary work should be free. We sweat and cry and work our tails off to create them, so at some point shouldn't we be compensated?

Lit, or any website for that matter, could easily create a virtual library of self-published books that follows the guidelines here on submission from topics to "how to". I've talked about this for years with several people (not here on Lit though - or at least I don't remember saying this here). All it would take is a catalog of self-published works. List the works (either with covers or by title only) and every visitor can buy any book for $.99 and download it. Just like an e-book because it IS an e-book. And, just like Lit uses an algorithm to scan each work, so would this site. And that algorithm would also search for key phrases to see if the work is published or available elsewhere.

Also, like Amazon and Good Reads, readers could submit reviews/comments on each book. Good books get good reviews and more sales. Bad books with review scores below a set level fall off the virtual shelf after 90 days and can't go back up even if re-submitted under a different title. (Is this subject to trolling? Not if reviewers had to have purchased the book they review from the site. Spend .99 and you get to say what you want. If you want to troll, then you have to pay for the privilege EVERY TIME. And the reviews would be credited to your account and any account with consistent negative reviews would be closed. It's all software.)

75-80% of sales would go to the author. Buyers would have to create an account and pay either via paypal (like ebay does it) or the account would have to be "pre-loaded' (like those debit cards) direct from another legitimate source (that's NOT a pre-loadable debit card) and maintain a credit balance. No direct CC purchases. The site makes it's money on sales volume. Based on readership views on my stories, the site would make a serious profit and authors would make a living too if their books were any good. Parental controls can used if thought necessary by the account creator.

I'm totally mystified why the major publishing houses don't do this. But then I can't figure out why they can't seem to put in an automatic reply email message that they received your manuscript either. Perhaps publishing as an industry is still stuck in the 12th century and they're using carrier pigeons and parchment?

In any event, this would give a different outlet for book sales instead of Amazon being (almost) the only source for digital works. And would probably curtail a lot of the scamming going on out there.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Lit, or any website for that matter, could easily create a virtual library of self-published books that follows the guidelines here on submission from topics to "how to". I've talked about this for years with several people (not here on Lit though - or at least I don't remember saying this here). All it would take is a catalog of self-published works. List the works (either with covers or by title only) and every visitor can buy any book for $.99 and download it. Just like an e-book because it IS an e-book. And, just like Lit uses an algorithm to scan each work, so would this site. And that algorithm would also search for key phrases to see if the work is published or available elsewhere.

...

75-80% of sales would go to the author. Buyers would have to create an account and pay either via paypal (like ebay does it) or the account would have to be "pre-loaded' (like those debit cards) direct from another legitimate source (that's NOT a pre-loadable debit card) and maintain a credit balance. No direct CC purchases. The site makes it's money on sales volume. Based on readership views on my stories, the site would make a serious profit and authors would make a living too if their books were any good. Parental controls can used if thought necessary by the account creator.

Some considerations:

#1: No, you can't use PayPal. Their terms of service specifically ban use for adult material of this kind. One of the recurring headaches for people who sell adult products/services is finding a payment provider. Many, like PP, simply won't handle this sort of stuff. The ones who do will often charge more, or they may put restrictions on what kind of material can be offered - for instance, no incest or non-con. Sometimes changes in policy mean people abruptly lose the revenue stream they were depending on, which can be devastating to somebody who was relying heavily on that.

Even if PP agreed to waive their rule against adult products... their fee is 2.9% of the transaction plus thirty cents. On a 99c transaction, that's 33c going to PayPal. It's impossible to give authors a 75% cut unless you're willing to run the site at a loss.

Even at 60% author payment (matching Amazon), that's 59c to the author and 33c to PP, making 92c, leaving seven cents per sale going to the site. That's not a huge margin. In practice, an adult-friendly provider will probably charge more, and even a small change to their fee schedule can up-end your business model.

#2: Literotica has to comply with tax regulations, which probably means collecting real-name IDs and SSNs so they can issue 1099s etc.

#3: Literotica now becomes a target for intrusion attempts, either directed at individual accounts (find an author, guess their password, change the payment details so the money from their books now goes to my account and not theirs) or at their database (a trove of real-name IDs and SSNs is valuable both for identity-theft purposes and, on an adult site, for blackmail).

#4: People now have a financial incentive to post stolen or junk books here. Key-phrase search only identifies material that's publicly searchable and hasn't been significantly altered; if Bob Smith has published a book on Amazon and Jane Doe obtains a copy, then uploads it here as her own, Literotica can't detect that duplication because it has no way to detect the fraud. Even if it did, Jane can claim that she really is Bob Smith - many authors publish on multiple platforms - which leaves the site with the headache of trying to verify that claim.

In the story that I linked, the crooks weren't using stolen story text; they were using algorithmically-generated gibberish. Catching that requires human moderation, which doesn't scale well.

#5: Literotica now has a perverse incentive not to deal with story theft. In the story I linked, Amazon was getting a 40% cut every time somebody bought one of the junk stories with a stolen credit card - is it any wonder that they didn't seem to be in a hurry to clean it up?

All my interactions with Laurel and Manu have been positive, but on principle it's just not a good idea to put people in a situation where they have a financial incentive to fuck you over.

 

[lovecraft68]

First off, I don't mind publishing here for free. I can write and test styles and tropes and not worry about how it affect my offsite work.

But not every literary work should be free. We sweat and cry and work our tails off to create them, so at some point shouldn't we be compensated?

Lit, or any website for that matter, could easily create a virtual library of self-published books that follows the guidelines here on submission from topics to "how to". I've talked about this for years with several people (not here on Lit though - or at least I don't remember saying this here). All it would take is a catalog of self-published works. List the works (either with covers or by title only) and every visitor can buy any book for $.99 and download it. Just like an e-book because it IS an e-book. And, just like Lit uses an algorithm to scan each work, so would this site. And that algorithm would also search for key phrases to see if the work is published or available elsewhere.

Also, like Amazon and Good Reads, readers could submit reviews/comments on each book. Good books get good reviews and more sales. Bad books with review scores below a set level fall off the virtual shelf after 90 days and can't go back up even if re-submitted under a different title. (Is this subject to trolling? Not if reviewers had to have purchased the book they review from the site. Spend .99 and you get to say what you want. If you want to troll, then you have to pay for the privilege EVERY TIME. And the reviews would be credited to your account and any account with consistent negative reviews would be closed. It's all software.)

75-80% of sales would go to the author. Buyers would have to create an account and pay either via paypal (like ebay does it) or the account would have to be "pre-loaded' (like those debit cards) direct from another legitimate source (that's NOT a pre-loadable debit card) and maintain a credit balance. No direct CC purchases. The site makes it's money on sales volume. Based on readership views on my stories, the site would make a serious profit and authors would make a living too if their books were any good. Parental controls can used if thought necessary by the account creator.

I'm totally mystified why the major publishing houses don't do this. But then I can't figure out why they can't seem to put in an automatic reply email message that they received your manuscript either. Perhaps publishing as an industry is still stuck in the 12th century and they're using carrier pigeons and parchment?

In any event, this would give a different outlet for book sales instead of Amazon being (almost) the only source for digital works. And would probably curtail a lot of the scamming going on out there.

Lit has pieces of this site that have been broken for years and haven't fixed yet. Their technology is barely a hamster in a wheel. You'd trust them to handle payouts and royalties? No thanks.