Serial scammers prey on aspiring authors with fraudulent publishing services
In the latest dispatch from the world of publishing fraud, a California couple has pled not guilty after being charged with, among other things, a publishing services scam that allegedly netted them $300,000.… Read more »
Did Houghton Mifflin Harcourt bribe the corrupt former head of Chicago Public Schools?
Another week, another alleged fraudster siphoning huge sums of ill-gotten cash out of the book business. At this point, MobyLives readers may be experiencing deja vu—and that’s perfectly understandable. But for all… Read more »
The Fake Scholastic Swindler pleads guilty
The long, sad story of the Scholastic School Swindler has taken a big step towards its conclusion. Robert S. Armstrong, who devised a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of… Read more »
This week in textbook theft and fraud
Textbooks. They’re heavy, expensive, and omnipresent, and they’re chained to education, which makes their demand fairly inelastic. And as we’ve previously covered, this makes them a fairly attractive object of… Read more »
Irish serial killer memoir is almost definitely a hoax
It’s been nine years since James Frey admitted that A Million Little Pieces got billed as a memoir because he couldn’t get it sold as a novel. Nine! That’s enough… Read more »
This week in college textbook sales fraud, at home and abroad
Bookstores, like all businesses, are susceptible to fraud. However, all committed perpetrators of fraud know that targets like bookstores, which aren’t wildly profitable, tend to be a bit of a… Read more »
More dispatches from textbook sales, a.k.a. the Deadwood of publishing
The Hunstville Times reports on an instructor recent running afoul of the authorities at the University of Alabama. Charles Christopher Horton was indicted on a felony ethics charge for requiring… Read more »