Now here is a beautiful scam!  Criminals in Vancouver went to amazing lengths to get their hands on some free iPads in exchange for the original version of a tablet… clay ones.

Apparently what they did was purchase real iPads for cash at Best Buy and Future Shop in Vancouver, took the iPAds out of the packaging  and replaced the iPads with clay tablets, carefully resealed the packaging and then later returned the – apparently – unopened packaging to the shops, saying they had changed their minds, got their money back and left the shop hurriedly.

The “iPads” they had purchased where then returned to the shelves, and in due time sold to other buyers, who obviously were far from amused to discover that instead of beautiful sleek modern iPads, they had bought the oldest form of tablet known to man, clay tablets!

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There are a huge number of online ereader and tablet sellers based in China, who tend to advertise on sites such as Alibaba, DHgate, EC21, Made-in-China and TradeKey, some of which I have looked at earlier in this blog.

In general I have liked what I have seen on these sites, provided you realize they are selling bottom of the line, cheap and unreliable products… which might or might not work.

Back in the days when a “real” ereader would cost you several hundred dollars, a cheap Chinese one for $60 was interesting, but no more, now that kindles can be had for as little as $70.

One thing they all have in common is the relatively low prices they are asking for their products, (cheap components and labour), but until recently they have all been honest enough in their ads.

Image source: http://arstechnica.com

The Knock-offs are coming:

But this is changing; I have noticed an increase in ads on these sites for cheap ereaders that claim to be Kindles, or Sonys or whatever.

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It isn’t even online yet, and already the predators are circling.

As all Harry Porter fans out there will know, Pottermore the website set up by JK Rowling to sell the ebook version of the whole Hogwarts epic is shortly going to become active, and promises to be a wonderful place for you all to meet, discuss and read all manner of stuff about all your favourite Hogwarts personalities, and as I discussed in an earlier post on this topic, they have gone to extra-ordinary lengths to try and make the site a safe and friendly place for kids to wander around in.

But…. 

However, in an attempt to generate even more interest in their site, Pottermore have made it possible for a limited number of people to register on the site before it is actually opened, and this is proving to be a dangerous mistake.

As soon as something like this site with the sort of following it is bound to generate offers any sort of special deal for people (at no cost), then the scam artists arrive in their hordes to make money out of this offering, and that has happened here – in spades!

There are no end of people now offering – for money – to sell you their early registration membership on eBay and similar places, almost all of these are scams of one sort or another. Read full story »

Kindle ebook store is becoming a nest of spammers:

When you buy a self published ebook from the Kindle ebook store you now run a very good chance of paying good money to be lumbered with an ebook that is full of malevolent links to dodgy websites and other forms of spam.

According to a recent report from Reuters many of the ebooks now being offered by the Kindle ebook store are in fact not really self published ebooks, but are in fact ebooks that spammers have  purchased for almost nothing and then added their nasty little tricks into them, and then put them onto the Kindle site for unwary buyers to download.

The problem is that ebooks that are offered via the Private Label content system at the Kindle ebook Store are effectively never checked by Amazon for such tricks, understandably as thousands of ebooks are published this way each month, so it isn’t really possible for Amazon to check them all for spam, or anything else really.

And for the unwary purchaser, it is completely impossible to see if the ebook that catches their interest in among all those cheap ebooks is a “real” ebook, or an ebook full of  spam in one form or another.

Apparently these spam ebooks are normally offered for a low price to attract buyers.

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Its a jungle out there folks!

In a post on daemonsbooks.com, the author warns us about a new danger out there.  As you know, it is very easy to embed hyperlinks into ebooks, which is a rather useful possibility for readers of ebooks on devices that connect to the internet with a built in web browser, such as the Kindle, the Nook and several other models of ereader, but this also enables those canny folk, the internet crooks to embed links that pretend to be to something relevant to the subject of the ebook, but are in fact links to websites which may well contain all manner of nasty things, including small programs (invisible apps to use the current terminology) that can cause all manner of problems for us.

This problem is to be found among the self-published ebooks in Amazon’s Kindle ebook store, in which there are literally thousands of  ebooks available to us, none of which have been checked for this sort of danger by Amazon.

He quotes the following example of how it works:

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