How scammers are making thousands of dollars via Kindle Unlimited by publishing fake e-books that are free to buy
KU Scammers on Amazon - What's Going On? — This is extremely long and probably only of interest to indie authors, but it does impact readers who shop Amazon, so I'm putting it here for anyone.
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands five months after Amazon's switch to paying Kindle Unlimited authors per page read instead of per download — a change meant to reward genuinely read books, but which quietly created a new arbitrage: any book that gets pages turned earns from the shared royalty pool, even if readers never intended to open it. Publishing e-books that are 'free to buy' and harvesting page-turns is the direct exploit of that metric.
It also proved to be an early sighting of a durable pattern rather than a one-off: months later ZDNet documented a catfishing ebook scam that had pulled in over $3M, and Krebs later traced a Createspace money-laundering operation built on dubious ebooks and impersonated authors. The Verge's coverage of KU romance authors openly gaming Amazon's algorithm shows the line between optimization and fraud blurring on the same platform.
First-order effects
- Legitimate indie authors enrolled in Kindle Unlimited see their share of the monthly royalty pool diluted every time a scam book racks up paid page-reads, while readers who 'buy' the free fakes get junk files and inflated bestseller charts mislead browsing shoppers.
- Amazon faces immediate cleanup costs: detecting and delisting fake titles, clawing back fraudulent payouts, and policing a self-service publishing pipeline it deliberately made frictionless.
Second-order effects
- Amazon is pushed toward stricter enrollment gates and manual review for KU — friction that lands hardest on honest self-publishers, who bear the cost of the fraudsters' tactics through slower approvals and tighter exclusivity rules.
- The demonstrated profitability invites scaling: the same playbook reappears as industrialized operations like the multi-million-dollar catfishing scheme, forcing Amazon's anti-fraud effort from ad-hoc takedowns into standing enforcement.
Third-order effects
- If engagement-based payouts keep getting gamed, subscription reading economics drift toward whoever manipulates metrics fastest — eroding reader trust in self-published catalogs and pressuring Amazon to treat marketplace integrity as a core product feature, not a support queue.
- The broader structural shift is that fully automated, low-friction creation-and-distribution pipelines (KU, Createspace, Marketplace) systematically attract monetization fraud, making platform verification layers an unavoidable cost of scale across Amazon's seller ecosystems.
The trend: Subscription and marketplace platforms that pay out on engagement metrics are becoming recurring targets for industrialized fraud, forcing Amazon to trade publishing openness for enforcement overhead.