Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Spamming Amazon (and Everything Else)

Just who are James Orr and Jassen Bowman?

I ran into these guy's CDs doing a search for "board games" in books.

Amazon lists them as having authored 47,653 audio books. The covers on each of them are almost identical. The titles range from "Internet Marketing For Your Insurance Policies Business" to "Internet Marketing For Your 50s Board Game Business".

According to comments on one of the items:
This CD has absolutely NOTHING to do with selling electronics. It's a trick. It is really about selling "information" over the internet. If you are interested in that, then buy it. But know that you are first being tricked by the title, so I don't know if I would trust the product. I bought the EXACT SAME cd, only the title was about selling "cranberry juice" instead of "electronics". I threw it away.
None of these books is available through Amazon. Every one is available new, by startling coincidence, from the same three stores (one is called "LEARNTOBERICH"), with almost no feedback, at wildly varying prices, from a few pennies to many dollars.

Doing a little Googling, you can see them selling the same thing on thousands of sites around the internet, all in high market fields: diamonds, insurance, online gaming, and so on. James Orr has a blog promising "real estate investing, business and personal development blog for partners, wholesalers and more". He provides a phone number on his blog, but it required me to enter my ten digit phone number to pass his screening (hard to do when calling from Israel).

Ooh, and look: James N. Parker and Philip M. Parker do the same thing with an astounding 73,328 titles, such as the ever useful "The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Board Games". But they don't go for the chump change; their books sell for $25 to $800 or more, new or used.

Amazon seems to have dropped the ball, here.

Update from Amazon:
Greetings from Amazon.com.

Thank you for contacting us with this information.

I have brought this to the attention of the appropriate department within Amazon.com for investigation. This team deals with possible violations of our use policies. Please know that for account privacy reasons, we cannot disclose the outcome of any investigation we may perform.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.
Yehuda

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello. My name is Jassen Bowman. Myself and James Orr provide detailed information about starting and running online businesses for a plethora of different industries.

James and I are both who we say we are. James really is a full time real estate investor (www.JamesOrr.com), and I am a Realtor (www.JassenBowman.com), and we are both professional marketers and feel that we provide an excellent source of information to those that are looking to start an online business.

Sincerely,

Jassen Bowman
jassen@weblaunch.org

Anonymous said...

Very interesting. I ran across this in Amazon (looks like title are still listed but no longer available) and was trying to figure out who these guys were.

Because these guys appear to be masters of SEO, this was the first result on Google (on page 14) that confronted who these guy were.

Although it is fairly amusing to see all the fake titles that they have thought of to try to get people to buy their audio books, i.e. The Techie Stuff: Setting Up Your Eyeliner Online Storefront,
Your Very Own Cubic Zirconia Online Business-In-A-Box and the seminal
Show Me The Money: The Financial Side of Selling Anti-reflux Pillows Online.