Beware "Bookwhirl"

[lovecraft68]

My wife has some books on amazon and today received a call from a woman who worked for "Bookwhirl" She didn't speak to them, she was with a client and it went to voice mail, but the woman sounded as if she could barely speak English.

So we googled them and found this

http://forums.writersweekly.com/viewtopic.php?t=8338

within this article is a few more links to other articles pointing out they are not legit.

So just passing it on in case anyone here ends up getting a call.

 

[oggbashan]

There are many scams like this.

When I was a secondhand bookdealer I used to receive several phone calls a month offering to market my store through a 'directory'. The fees were typically one hundred pounds for a quarter page. Some didn't bother with the phone call. They just sent a pro-forma invoice stating that they HAD entered me in their directory, usually misspelled (so that you would contact them to correct it!) and request payment by return.

In the days of thermal fax machines they would waste a lot of my paper sending 'copy for approval'.

 

[49greg]

It's not just publishing

When I was a purchasing agent I was constantly getting scam calls. The most common, especially when I was new and learning the ropes, were calls claiming to be surveys about our usage of cleaning supplies, or light bulbs, toilet paper etc supplies. At the end of the conversation they would then ask what the shipping address was to send this stuff to! I was always surprised but said no.

One guy wouldn't take no for an answer and started offering me things like electric saws, hand drills, etc. When I said I wasn't allowed to accept things like that, he told me not to worry, they would send it directly to my home!

It didn't take me long to be able to ID these people and get rid of them before wasting any more time.