From the “Now See Here, Motherfucker, We Work Hard On Those Reviews” department comes word of an eBay store swiping the reviews written by other users on Amazon and review blogs, and posting them on their own book listings under their own name.
The EDson Financial Group has posted over 220 reviews on eBay, and according to a few online sources, including Joyfully Reviewed, those beefy reviews were swiped from other sources, usually from among Amazon featured reviews.
Kathleen Gilligan has posted about it and has started notifying reviewers on Amazon via the comment feature that their writing has been thieved for eBay without attribution.
For example: a review for “Charm!” “by” Kendall Hart posted on 23 February 2008 matches identically a review by Carol “Avid 20-something reader” on Amazon.com, posted 18 February 2008.
Edson Financial Group has a website and a search of the whois reveals a potential individual to contact for Administrative and Technical reasons:
Corey Malison, from Montreal, Canada, is listed as the Admin/Tech contact for edsonfg.com. In addition, Malison has a Facebook but it’s visible by friends only.
A search of Edson Financial Groups reviews doesn’t seem to reveal any Smart Bitch reviews (Too many cursewords?) or Dear Author reviews (Letter-to-author format not worth swiping?) but there are plenty that seem very, very familiar. If you find a review you wrote, let me know.
I’m contacting Malison to see if I can get a response, but in the meantime, reviewers beware. Thanks to Katie for the heads up.