Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

> Scammers claiming to have the rights to my books commission narrators to record them on the cheap, with the promise of a royalty split when they are live. Inexperienced narrators, excited at the prospect of recording a major book by a bestselling author, put long, grueling hours into recording them. Then the book goes live, and I discover it, and have it taken down. The scammer disappears with the profits from the sales in the interim, and the narrator is screwed.

If I was a narrator, why wouldn't I do a basic search to see if the audiobook exists, or contact the author/publisher to verify ownership rights, before investing all this time and effort because someone said they own something?

99% of scams work because the scammee didn’t do due diligence. “Why wouldn’t you check property records to see if the person renting you that sweet apartment actually owns it?” Sounds like common sense yet people fall for this scam all the time.

Because most people do check and a scam only occurs if one person doesn’t.

At the very least you'd check their ID so the police has something to go on. And don't pay cash.

Simply because it would never occur to you that it could be part of a scam.

We're trained to think of scams as involving Nigerian princes, misspelled e-mails, password phishing, .exe attachments, or "I've got a bridge to sell you".

It's nowhere near obvious how contracting an audiobook narration, of all things, could or would be a scam. You'd have to know there was a market/scam for counterfeit audiobooks which I never imagined until I read this. In fact, it's pretty convoluted and I'm still pretty surprised to discover it exists.

On top of which, contacting an author isn't always easy, and figuring out how to navigate from a publisher's consumer customer service to a person who can actually correctly verify rights is probably going to be a long annoying journey.

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