Bagged and Tagged

Tracking the questionable activities of Carolyn Arnold led us to many other authors using the same shameful tactics. One of these authors is Carmen DeSousa whose reviews were written by some of the same “friends” as Carolyn Arnold. Carmen DeSousa’s deceptive reviewers were much harder to track however, as the reviewers weren’t as overt.

 

What we found with Carmen DeSousa were reviewers who were more sophisticated. They understood how to game the system, how to try to blend in. Instead of using more easily tracked full names, these reviewers tended to use first names or pen names, so we found reviewers like Bubba’s Mom & Dad, Romance Reader, WiLoveBooks, Kim Pitbull123, Amy R, TomTer7, MyKindle, London Fog, Peace, and Nancy of Utah who wrote review after review for Carmen DeSousa.

 

Plenty of author friends and friend friends who openly wrote reviews too

 

Ashley Fontainne

Karen DeLabar

Jaime Rush

Ann Mullen

Christine Steendam

Rebecca Neilsen

Robert Lee Carey Jr

Ruthie Derby

Linda Giron

Rachel Jorgensen

Teresa Cypher

Shaunna Rodriguez

Orlando Ramos

Rick Gillispie

Marilou George

Dr. S Drecker

 

If you took a look at Carolyn Arnold’s reviews, you probably recognize many of these names. They wrote fake reviews for Carolyn Arnold too.

 

Like Carolyn Arnold, Carmen DeSousa is friends with several of the top-ranked reviewer shills. But another reason DeSousa’s questionable reviews were difficult to track to source was that DeSousa made use of a few new “review” networks we hadn’t encountered before like a romance blogger network, which was run by romance writers and where these writers swapped feature posts and interviews with each other like cigarettes.

 

Based on our findings, we found the following on Amazon

 

91 of 102 reviews of She Belongs to Me were fake, written by the authors friends, including the authors and friends listed above

10 of 10 reviews of Entangled Dreams were fake, written by the authors friends, including the authors and friends listed above

18 of 21 reviews of Land of the Noonday Sun were fake, written by the authors friends, including the authors and friends listed above

12 of 12 reviews of Split Decisions were fake, written by the authors friends, including the authors and friends listed above

7 of 7 reviews of When Noonday Ends were fake, written by the authors friends, including the authors and friends listed above

33 of 34 reviews of The Depot were fake, written by the authors friends, including the authors and friends listed above

37 of 39 reviews of The Pitstop were fake, written by the authors friends, including the authors and friends listed above

 

More on how fake blogs are being used in future posts.