Fraud “Andrew Gates” on Amazon Using my Name

Well, I’ve done it! I’ve officially gotten big and famous enough for people to use my name on their product to sell books. While I’m honored to finally be considered an important-enough writer for people to want to steal my identity, I’ll say this: It is also extremely annoying.

For those of you who don’t know the ins and outs of the Amazon publishing world, here’s some background:

When an author makes a book available through online retailers like Amazon.com, they have their own author page. This is a page where authors can personalize their bio, photo, links, blog, videos and so forth. Authors can put up a lot of stuff of their choosing so that fans can follow the author and the author’s updates. For instance, this blog you are reading right now will appear on my author page.

But if you visit my page right now, you’ll notice some strange content there that doesn’t belong to me. Take a look at the images below and see if you notice some books that shouldn’t be there:

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If you spotted Thriving With ADHD and Anxiety, then you’re right! This book about ADHD is listed on my page with me listed as the author and if you click the product link, you will see that it has my description in the “About the Author” section.

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And here, if you spotted, Cleanse, Detox, and Reset, then you’re right! This book about detoxifying is also not mine, but once again lists me as the author and if you click the product link, you will see that it has my description in the “About the Author” section.

So how is this happening?

To link a book to someone’s author page, one must do it through a second website called Author Central, which is a website that manages the back-end of these Amazon author pages. To link a book to an author, an intentional process must be made for someone to search for and link the authors to their books. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS AUTOMATICALLY. In fact, there have been times when I myself have had delays in linking my own books to my own page. It is not always smooth and straightforward. Therefore, to have done this, someone intentionally had to have searched for and linked these books to my author page.

In all likelihood, I suspect this person really might be named Andrew Gates and could very well be using their real name. After all, Andrew Gates is a fairly common name. However, that being said, I also think this person is intentionally linking their books to my page because, as I already mentioned, this is not something that just happens automatically.

This began happening about a week ago when I noticed that both Thriving With ADHD and Anxiety and another book, DIY BUCKET AEROPONICS: Ultimate Guide To Growing Vegetable With An Aeroponic System, both listed on my page and with my bio in the description.

But what these authors must not have realized is that when these books go up as being “my books” on Amazon, that means I now have control over details of those books through Author Central. That means, being that these are considered “my books”, I can edit things like product description. And so, when I first noticed these two books on my page, I edited the product descriptions as follows:

This is not my book. Please remove it from my page. Thank you.

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I edited the description to say those words for both Thriving With ADHD and Anxiety and for DIY BUCKET AEROPONICS. Additionally I also changed the “From the Author” section to read as follows:

 

From the Author


The author listed on this Amazon page is not the author of this book. The supposed author of this book did not write this and does not consent to someone else using his name to sell a product that he is not affiliated with.


As I hoped, what happened next was that DIY BUCKET AEROPONICS no longer appeared on my page. Whoever put it up clearly saw what I changed and wisely decided to take it down (and yet, as of now, despite being taken off my page and despite me no longer having editing power over that book, that product description remains up).


However, the other book, Thriving With ADHD and Anxiety not only remained on my page and kept my bio, but whoever is behind this book changed the description back to it’s original description. Not only that, but another book was added to my page, the aforementioned Cleanse, Detox and Reset.


Whoever put these up clearly saw my message because they took down one book and changed back the description of the other. These actions only further proved that whoever is doing this is doing so intentionally. So this time, I was a little less kind in changing the product description:


Please DO NOT purchase this book, as it is being published without proper permissions or consent. Someone is going around and trying to credit an author for writing this book even though the credited author had nothing to do with this project. The author listed on this Amazon page is not the author of this book. The supposed author of this book did not write this and does not consent to someone else using his name to sell a product that he is not affiliated with.


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At this point, I was bluntly telling customers not to purchase the book. If this is how this copycat person is going to operate, then I have no sympathies, especially since this is now their second chance.


I even did some investigating to see who this person may have been. In the case of Thriving With ADHD and Anxiety, the original product description (before I changed it) mentioned that Andrew Gates (the other Andrew Gates) was the Silver (second place) winner of the Benjamin Awards in the ADHD Category. So naturally, I decided to look up all past winners of the Benjamin Awards to see if I could find this Andrew Gates listed. Although the year that this person won an award was not provided in the description, the book was published in April 2020, so I figured it would be the last two years. I checked back to 2017 and not only was there no Andrew Gates listed in the past winners, but THERE WAS NO CATEGORY FOR ADHD.


This tells me that even before being caught using someone else’s author page, this other Andrew Gates was already being a fraud and claiming things that were untrue (though I do find it funny that this person fabricated an easily-searchable award and still gave themselves second place).


Naturally, I outed this person again by editing the “From the Inside Flap” section:



From the Inside Flap



The supposed “author” claims to have won silver in the Benjamin awards in the ADHD category, but there isn’t even an ADHD category at the Benjamin awards. Furthermore, if you look at the past winners, someone named Andrew Gates isn’t listed anywhere on the page for any category. This person who is publishing this book is a fraud using Andrew Gates’s name to sell books. This is not the same person as the science-fiction author, Andrew Gates. Take a look at the Benjamin awards yourself with this link:

ibpabenjaminfranklinaward.com/2020-wi...



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At the time of me writing this, these edited descriptions are still up on both books, though it is a mystery how long they will remain up. I certainly hope that these books get taken down from my page and that whoever is doing this learns to build their own brand name instead of piggy-backing on the success of another. On that note, I also hope that this other Andrew Gates somehow finds this blog post and reads it.



In the meantime, all this silliness really amounts to nothing. Having a brand name only gets you so far. You need to have the quality content to back it up. If this other Andrew Gates is a good writer, then he need not worry. It may be slow, but he’ll get there.


Or, I guess I could always fight my impostor like Jack Sparrow…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2FjIRK2psQ


Until next time!