How to handle someone creating multiple spam accounts to promote a book

[Graham]

Someone is creating multiple spam accounts to promote the book "Untold Stories of the Little Prince."

They create usernames like "We recommend Untold Stories of the Little Prince - Good|Reads recommendation team" and "We recommend Untold Stories of the Little Prince" and "Books like The Little Prince" and then click to like the star rating for my review of The Little Prince. They've also clicked to like my star rating of another book. This then comes through to me both as an email and as a phone notification, looking almost like the Goodreads app is recommending the book: "We recommend Untold Stories of the Little Prince liked your review of Life of Pi on Goodreads!"

After liking a bunch of posts, this user then changes their name back to something innocuous like "User" to try to avoid detection. Here's one example: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1...

I've flagged the accounts as spam each time, but this person keeps creating new ones.

What, if anything, can be done to stop this? Should anything be done to the page for the book itself? (The top two user reviews mention the spam issue, but plenty of people don't read as far as the reviews. 3690 have marked the book as "want to read," likely in large part due to being mislead by this spam.)

[Renske]

Spam accounts are handled by the staff, librarians can't do anything about it.

[Graham]

Given the repeated offenses, which staff are apparently unable to handle, would it be considered appropriate or inappropriate to add a sentence at the start of the book's Description field to warn users of what's going on?

[lethe]

Graham wrote: "would it be considered appropriate or inappropriate to add a sentence at the start of the book's Description field to warn users of what's going on?"

I don't think staff would consider that appropriate, and it's not something librarians should do of their own accord.

The users he has been spamming recognize his M.O. and will know to report and block his various accounts.

[✿ Bri ❀, Librarian Moderator]

Graham wrote: "Someone is creating multiple spam accounts to promote the book "Untold Stories of the Little Prince."

They create usernames like "We recommend Untold Stories of the Little Prince - Good|Reads reco..."


Hey there! :)

For any spam related reports, please contact Goodreads Support here and provide them with the links to the spammy accounts so that they can take appropriate action.

Have a good one and Happy Holidays y'all!