With the whole ecosystem stacked against new and indie authors, and AI getting so good I can see why some people could easily fall for this. I made the tough decision at the start of my Sci-Fi novel writing career to work 100% on the book and 0% on the marketing. It meant I got zero traction and attention in the market (except by word of mouth), and I had to keep my day job, but totally took away all the stress and anxiety.
When I retired last year I took the next logical step and now I give my eBooks away for free, being content with the fact I've achieved something good and I'm giving back to the community.
The need to defend against scams and abuse is a cost distributed across all of society - it’d be amazing if there were a way for all to share the costs without creating a giant firewall to wall off the bad countries.
How does one take the good and reject the bad? Even our immune systems still get beaten by cancers.
That's life I'm afraid - no system that rewards participation can be entirely free of people taking advantage of it somehow. It's an unavoidable cost that we pay to get the benefits. The best we can usually do is to incentivize good behaviour sufficiently that the percentage of bad actors is very low, using rewards and/or punishments as appropriate.
When I retired last year I took the next logical step and now I give my eBooks away for free, being content with the fact I've achieved something good and I'm giving back to the community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Macdonald
How does one take the good and reject the bad? Even our immune systems still get beaten by cancers.
It's something telling about the internet when spam transitioned from Viagra to cloud computing 8-/