scam.jpgMark Coker of Smashwords alerted me to this scam. Keep your eyes open. From Smashwords:

This disturbs me to no end. A Smashwords author found their book mentioned on this site – http://best1ebooks.com/ – and wrote us to ask if we’re distributing to them. Definitely not. They appear to be scraping Smashwords book covers and book descriptions and then selling [who knows what, but definitely not our books] at marked up prices. The site is designed to trick customers. It features false logos to make it look like the shopping experience is a safe one, but odds are if you enter your credit card information (don’t!) you just gave your information to a criminal. Whatever they’re doing is certainly illegal. The domain name appears to be registered to a company in Germany – http://reports.internic.net/cgi/whois?whois_nic=best1ebooks.com&type=domain I contacted the domain registrar and asked them to disable the domain, which forwards to a store powered by a template driven shopping cart system called QuickCart – http://shop.1asecure.com/index.cfm?DeptNo=5&StID=11305. I left a message for the operators of Quickcart to take down the store. Sadly, I think we’ll see more of this in the future. These fly by night outfits erect search engine optimized web sites that pull in traffic, they steal the customer’s money, and then they disappear.

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