Inside a two-year-old catfishing ebook scam on Amazon that has generated over $3M in revenue for its creator, Valeriy Shershnyov
For years, thousands were tricked into buying low-quality ebooks. — NEW YORK — Emma Moore could have been the health and weight loss guru you spent your life looking for.
Context & Ripple Effects
This ZDNet exposé lands mid-arc in a decade-long pattern of Amazon publishing fraud. Months before it ran, Ann Christy documented how scammers were already publishing fake ebooks to farm Kindle Unlimited payouts, so Shershnyov's 'Emma Moore' persona was an evolution of that playbook — swapping royalty farming for direct sales under a fabricated identity.
What makes the $3M figure matter is what came after: the same marketplace mechanics later surfaced in Createspace being used to launder money through dubious ebooks, plagiarized books dominating Amazon's COVID-19 search results, sellers backdating titles to game the algorithms, and by 2023 shoddy AI-compiled guidebooks promoted with deceptive reviews. The catfishing scheme is an early proof that Amazon's discovery engine could be monetized by whoever controlled the persona, not the content.
First-order effects
- Thousands of buyers paid for health and weight-loss ebooks written under a persona that did not exist, while Valeriy Shershnyov collected over $3M in revenue across two years of operation.
- Amazon is directly implicated as the storefront: the scheme's scale shows its author-identity checks and review systems failed to flag a single seller running fabricated identities at volume.
Second-order effects
- Every subsequent fraud documented on the platform — backdated books manipulating search placement, plagiarized bestsellers, AI-assembled guidebooks — follows the same incentive Shershnyov proved out: gaming Amazon's ranking signals pays better than writing books.
- Legitimate self-published authors absorb the trust cost, competing in categories where deceptive personas and review manipulation set buyer expectations and depress conversion for honest listings.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, marketplace platforms face a structural choice between friction-heavy identity verification for publishers and ceding their recommendation surfaces to whoever industrializes fabrication fastest — a tension each new wave, from catfished ebooks to generative-AI guidebooks, has sharpened rather than resolved.
The trend: Amazon's self-publishing pipeline has become a recurring target for identity-fabrication and content-farming schemes, with each exposé revealing that monetizing the platform's algorithms outruns its moderation.