Authors Without A Yacht (AWaY) discussion

I understand that it is legal for a person to sign up to be an affiliate of Amazon or Smashwords... as long as the author agrees to paying commissions to affiliates.

Every commission paid to an affiliate means a further 10% or more that is diverted from the author. If the author is glad to pay for the marketing help, that's cool.

What about a situation where an affiliate impersonates an author?

How would readers --or authors-- react to that?

I saw this tip on a discussion about making money by selling other peoples' e-books.

Quote:
Quoting:

"How To Make $$$ From Amazon Kindle Books and Freebie Sites

This is a pretty straight forward method and the whole idea behind it is to bring huge buyer orientated traffic to your amazon affiliate link.

First go to Amazon.com and pick a free kindle book. The perfect choice would be one that has both paperback and kindle edition and the paperback actually costs a few bucks.

Try to avoid the most famous authors like Arthur Conan Doyle for example. Now when your done with the first step build a simple fake landing page
for the book. It shouldn't contain more than the image, book description and a page about the author. Make sure that the LP looks like its the authors site.You can even put a few more of his titles to make it more realistic...."

End quotes. My italics. My bolding.

What do you think?

Obviously what this person is proposing is unethical. It's a bait and switch scheme and identity theft. Anyone who does this is no better than a criminal.

It sounds like fraudulent advertising at the very least.

It's amazing what people will do. I wonder why they cannot get a legitimate job.

Moral turpitude issues, perhaps?

Rowena wrote: "It's amazing what people will do. I wonder why they cannot get a legitimate job.

Moral turpitude issues, perhaps?"

They probably think they're being clever.