[astrodust]

How about a manual review of any anomalously high payouts? Someone who showed up out of nowhere and starts pulling down $70K a month should at least be given a cursory investigation. Based on the description here it wouldn't take five minutes to uncover the problem.

[blowski]

Some of the self-published stuff is so bad it's hard to tell whether it's spam or not. One person's pageturner classic could be another person's spam.

[astrodust]

Sure, there's an element of ambiguity here, but those books don't pull down tens of thousands of dollars in "sales" without a whole lot of marketing.

[kbenson]

The problem here is the assumption that one account pulls down tens of thousands of dollars. There's nothing keeping the scammers from spreading the ebooks across multiple accounts, and getting $1000 an account across 70 accounts. That's much harder to track by the method suggested due to both the sheer number or accounts and the much smaller payout per account.

[jethro_tell]

I think this is the crux of it. Spam is a lot harder to track than most people realize. Written spam is still a thing in email 30 years later. There's a solution to this but I assume it's a cat and mouse game. To think Amazon just doesn't care about the authors getting scammed is foolish. Without a lot of human involvement this is a very big problem space. One could accuse the program of being poorly thought out but I think that the idea that no one cares about the issue is disingenuous.