| I think I have the answer, and it's a lot less interesting than it appears at face value. These titles are created by an IT company that is selling software / services. The software appears to do platform price matching / analytics, and one of those is on Amazon. My understanding / assumption is that it appears that if they are a high frequency sellerid paired to their developerid, then they can increase their requests per second (http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/dev_guide/DG_...) either by requesting a change, or maybe via background quotas set by Amazon. The IT company has some promotional stuff, and they indicate a number of VM's using multiple public IPs to avoid throttling, and in addition: > [as a top seller we get 8 rp/s, instead of the newbie 0.5 rp/s against 20 items per request] I went through some of the sellers, and noted some have some complete shite ratings, but that their ratings are consistently at a certain value even over 30/90/12 months. Lifetime values are highly skewed as it appears they pre-stuffed the hat. So for every real person that gets screwed by a cancelled order, they create a number of fake reviews. So my conclusion based on what I see is that this is their place-holder author, each of the clients they've sold this to has a store front stocked with these titles, the clients generate a ton of fake sales at a reduced price, request a quota increase as "we're a large seller", and then happily do whatever system gaming they actually intended to do. I could go further down this rabbit hole, but this hypothesis has been exhausted. I wish I was this interested in my actual job. |