Every once in a while I google one or other of my books, and
almost always find them listed on a pirate site. Oh, the joys of authorship. I won't even go there, but this whole
new (to me) racket I've stumbled upon is worth sharing.
I found my not yet released book listed on two seemingly
different sites—free on other, for money on the other. The second one even
looked pretty professional, complete with reviews pulled straight from Goodreads.
The takedown notice email sent to the first site came back
as undeliverable. No big surprise. Now, here comes the interesting part: when
clicking on the download button at each, I was sent to the exact same login
page. To create an account all I had to do was enter my email address and my credit card umber.
Needless to say, my internal klaxons broke into a howl at
that very moment. After further poking I discovered the following facts: There
are various sites out there—I have no idea how many—offering everything from
movie streaming to books magazines, comics. They look different, have unique
urls, but they all lead to the same site where you need to create an account by
providing a credit card number right upfront.
Yes, dear reader, you guessed it right: this is a scam. But not a garden variety one, because
if they simply stole your numbers they'd be shut down pretty fast. The cleverly
nefarious part of this operation is that they simply start charging monthly
fees to your card, whether you use their services or not. Apparently, their
"free" trial period last five days and they charge you if you try to
cancel. (I've learned this from complaints of unhappy customers.)
And it's probably perfectly legal. I wasn't stupid enough to
go far enough in the process to encounter it, but I bet there is at one point a
term of service they make you agree to. And who reads those? (I'm fairly
certain I've promised my firstborn to Apple during one those iTunes upgrades.)
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