Most people already know that amazon is full of Chinese knock offs with fake reviews, but many don't realize that most of the books are low effort knock offs too!
I am a language teacher and author. All of the language learning book categories on amazon have been taken over by a group called Lingo Mastery.
Lingo Mastery pays for fake 5 star reviews. Grady Harp, a spam review account, has reviewed every book. If you look at the other types of books Grady Harp reviews, you can see that low effort knock offs have taken over many categories of books, such as cooking, fitness, investing, self-help, romance novels, and children's books.
The group behind Lingo Mastery publishes under multiple author names, in case they get exposed, they can move on to a new name, as they have done before. Compare their books to Touri Language Learning.
Lingo Mastery has a reddit account, GGisland. GGisland claims Lingo Mastery is a group of native speakers with teaching backgrounds. GGisland also says it was difficult to create Japanese resources. I am language teacher. It is easy to create learning resources. We real teachers learned how to do it by studying for years and have years of experience. Considering Lingo Mastery's books are mostly rewritten word lists, things you can find for free online, it's more likely the books are outsourced to scam book farms. Lingo Mastery gives away free copies of their books and asks reddit users for feedback (and email). Real teachers would never do this. Would a group of architects post their blueprints and ask reddit for feedback? No, of course not.
In my experience websites that try to detect fake reviews and products are not accurate. In my opinion the best thing to do is only buy books which name the real author, and make sure the author is a real person.
EDIT first response to GGisland
GGisland claims Touri Language Learning is stealing their brand. However, a number of Touri's similar books were published before Lingo Mastery's books. Do they also have a time machine?
GGisland claims Grady Harp is a legitimate reviewer. This might be possible if he didn't have a job and just read books all day every day, but that is highly unlikely. Is Grady Harp studying 20 languages at once? If nothing else, he was given a free copy of a book in exchange for a review, but it's obviously not possible for Grady Harp to have read any of Lingo Mastery's books, so the reviews can not be genuine. Another reviewer known as Robin Leigh Morgan has also reviewed most of Lingo Mastery's books.
GGisland claims that the reviews are a result of free book giveaways. I do this myself. You can get about 3 reviews per 1000 downloads. I gave away a book in a very popular language for free for a year on amazon. It was downloaded about 2500 times in a one year period. Lingo Mastery's Conversational Dutch Dialogues book has 5 reviews, which would be possible with about 1500-2000 downloads. This Dutch book has been published for 6 weeks. How is it that book about a small niche language was able to garner nearly as many downloads in 6 weeks when it took a book in a much more popular language a year for the same numbers?
If Lingo Mastery is a genuine author, then who wrote the books? What are the author's names and qualifications? I'll say it again, real teachers don't need feedback about what is effective and what isn't, and certainly wouldn't ask random people on the internet for feedback. We went to school for years to learn what works.
EDIT second response to GGisland
GGisland claims Grady Harp is someone who was given an advance copy of the book, but claims Robin Leigh Morgan is just a polyglot? She also makes multiple reviews every day for a wide variety of books. Not only are her and Grady studying 20 languages at once (Business English too for some reason), but they are learning to cook, exercise, invest in the stock market, and spend their free time reading and reviewing kids books?
GGisland claims they were able to get the reviews by driving lots of traffic to the books. The Dutch Short Story book received 21 reviews in 3 months. Was it downloaded 5000 times? The Korean Short Stories book has 6 reviews and it has been out for less than a week! Were they really able to get 3000 downloads in a week when it took me a year with a much more popular language? If what GGisland says is true, they are the greatest marketers in the history of the world!
If Lingo Mastery is a genuine publisher then who are the teachers Lingo Mastery hired and what are their qualifications? Why don't they want credit for their writing? They may be the only non-fiction authors in the world that don't want any credit for their work.
by goans314