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.
And the proposed interviews? Yes, not for a couple of months. Once the books are in the stores, then you can focus on sales. Next month.
What about the online marketing? Next month. It was only when the meetings that they organized on our recent book tour were cancelled, just before we left home, that it was clear something was seriously wrong.
The image below shows one of the obvious red flags. We never saw the people we worked with. Not over 8 months! (I know how dumb this was, especially in retrospect, but they said it was a rule that stopped us from poaching their best staff)
Consequences
Well, obviously, our money was taken for very little in return. There was just enough work done to give the impression that it was just an inefficient business we were dealing with, rather than scammers. Head office was always slowing them down they said. But all the expensive items we paid for, like professionally organized interviews, advertising, physical book distribution and electronic sales were not done.
Identity Theft
What was done was a website funded by us. *** WARNING THIS SITE IS STILL ACTIVE IN THE SCAMMER’S CONTROL *** We chose a domain name to sell all my books from one place.
https://johnball.ai
*** DO NOT GO THERE! ***
This site collected money for those who want to purchase my books, but they never sent any books. Worse, once we took action to have the company investigated, all the staff vanished (it was remote), their website disappeared, and emails all bounced back.
*** But DO go to Amazon.com to buy the real book! (click here) ***
When someone uses your name, pretends to sell your book, and charges for it you would imagine that it would be easy to have it stopped. I did. But it isn’t.
I don’t ‘own’ that website and don’t have any passwords, so the hosting companies involved aren’t shutting it down. A site that scammers setup using my name seems impossible to stop. Nobody owns it. Is it the US government I should complain to? California? ICANN? The registrar GoDaddy.com, LLC? The hosting company Inmotion Hosting? The police? None of the above?
For the moment there seems no way to stop a company impersonating me from selling my books that they will never deliver. Outstanding orders remain back to late 2024.
Red Flags
What’s my warning? Well, be careful. We needed a publisher because we believe that the new age requires self-reliance, not necessarily a deal with an existing publisher. This publisher claimed to have been working for decades with experience in all the big issues of publishing, working with the maze of online organizations like Amazon, Dymocks, Barnes & Noble and many more. To get to physical bookshops needs a printer and distribution system. And marketing is always needed in the modern world.
But there were many red flags:
The business calls were always done by video call, but never with the video turned on at their end so we never got the meet the 4-5 people we dealt with.
Activities were managed with email. The emails kept getting larger and larger as a consequence, making it hard to verify commitments that were missed.
There are always problems in business, but these guys seemed to have endless problems explainable by unlikely causes. The lack of book shipments were caused by the fires in LA that destroyed the production factory site. It would take 6 weeks to fix. Our contact couldn’t talk for a month because he was diagnosed with high cholesterol. Both our contacts were missing for 2 weeks, because both lost their homes to the LA fires. There was always a plausible, but unlikely, reason.
We were upset that our interviews were cancelled at the last minute, but one was added as a ‘sign of good faith.’ Well, 2 weeks later, it was cancelled anyway because I was asking for the money from our sales to be paid.
It apparently is standard in the printing industry to wait for 90 days to be paid for orders. Maybe that is true. But the date wasn’t set at the time of the order, but at the end of the quarter!! (i.e. orders in October would be paid 90 days after December 31 - early April!).
After waiting for payment for 6 months (October to April 1!) we were told the money was waiting in an account on hold until we made another payment.
At this point, we contacted the Better Business Bureau (BBB) which pointed out that their website and contact details were now non-responsive. Indeed, they closed down their website hosting, while keeping my website that took payments running (but they never sent any books when ordered).
Conclusion
Well, be careful. Most people are good and want to do a good job. A few aren’t. There is a lesson here somewhere, and we are moving on, looking to relaunch the book publication later in 2025.
Adversity? I went to an LLM to find the way forward. Here’s what it offered in part:
“ Write… Stay disciplined… Use your sense of humour… Have faith.”
OK, I need to write another book to follow on this first one. The rest seems sensible, too. Now I’m feeling better and can get back to work!
Every problem we deal with makes us stronger, or so I’m told. Let’s move on to the next task. We have a speech genie to bring to market to improve language learning with brain science, and an education service to show the difference between symbolic AI for meaning and knowledge for use in conversation for universities.
Do you want to get more involved?
If you want to get involved with our upcoming project to enable a gamified language-learning system, the site to track progress is here (click). You can keep informed by adding your email to the contact list on that site.
Do you want to read more?
If you want to read about the application of brain science to the problems of AI, you can read my latest book, “How to Solve AI with Our Brain: The Final Frontier in Science” to explain the facets of brain science we can apply and why the best analogy today is the brain as a pattern-matcher. The book link is here on Amazon in the US.
In the cover design below, you can see the human brain incorporating its senses, such as the eyes. The brain’s use is being applied to a human-like robot who is being improved with brain science towards full human emulation in looks and capability.
Awful! As someone with a book nearing completion I can’t thank you enough for sharing.