Member-only story
I was Scammed!
.. the sophisticated Los Angeles based con
Nobody likes being scammed. The Sting was a great movie with Robert Redford and Paul Newman starring as grifters looking to get rich. By stealing from the mob boss played by Robert Shaw, the ethics didn’t seem so bad. But for my business venture into publishing my work in brain science and its engineering with cognitive science, finally realizing you’ve been scammed is a shock.
After contacting the Better Business Bureau (BBB) to get the contracted refund, the business vanished off the internet, phones no longer worked and the physical building became unoccupied.
Well, the signs were there from the beginning, but you probably care what the impact was. We lost an investment of around $30,000 paid in advance to a company who claimed to be the part of Amazon that did the publishing services for them and others. Their name, based in California, was Amazon KDP Publishers.
The package looked legit. Interviews planned, sending 20 books each to 4000 stores, publishing to most online book shops and lots of promotion. Needless to say, the execution on those parts was always a task to do next month once sales on other channels establish the success of the book through sales figures.
