How Hackers Skim the Till at Amazon and Steal From Authors

I’m not a big fan of Bernie Sanders. I think he’s a cool guy and means well… but socialism? ugh. It’ll never happen. I’m not against helping the less fortunate or the needy (cripes, I give away over 10% of my income every year ad have statements to prove it–benevolence giving brings my income below the poverty line if it wasn’t there already, so don’t attack my politics; that’s not what this is about.) This isn’t even a political issue for me, it’s a human nature issue. Because we are unique individuals, we will never be satisfied with every person getting an equal share/percentage take of a communal pot. Mankind is fundamentally flawed and someone will always try to skew the system in their favor so that they get more.

So that was perhaps a risky segue into this great article I read recently about how there are people scamming authors (the majority of them self-published) out of the money due to them from the Kindle Unlimited program. Essentially, scammers have successfully pulled of the Superman 3 money hack, only they didn’t target banks who have fiduciary responsibility to deal with the problem: the target of the theft has been authors, and so nobody has really cared until enough people have learned of the scam because (like in the movie Officespace) it has risen to such large proportions that it can no longer go undiscovered.

It was crafty how these scammers figured out how to steal a portion of the community pool which is distributed each month to participating KU authors. This article (below) is worth the read, and I echo Ann Christy’s sentiments: this is “probably only of interest to indie authors, but it does impact readers who shop Amazon… though readers sure are noticing the impacts of the scams.”

Her article is here:
http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-know/

Here’s the long and short of it until the problems are resolved: if you use KU to read unlimited books, make sure you jump to the last page before you are completed with the book. It supports the author and helps him or her reclaim lost “reads/money” from “KU click farmers” and helps them continue their efforts.