Below is a post written by an anonymous blog reader who wanted us to share the information with our readers.
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Joe G. first came to the attention of the Goodreads Bullies in November. Some suspicious accounts appeared, one of which tried to friend known bully TinaNicole.
Note the email addresses, which are very similar.
This seems to have prompted the bullies to dig into Joe’s background, and .
Naturally, this was enough to get Joe branded as a pervert and worse.
He then did one of the worst things an author can do under the circumstances: he contacted a known bully (Mahala, “Spare Ammo” on Booklikes) to get her to take down her post.
This only intensified the attack, and brought it to the attention of more people. Considering that the accounts mentioned in these links had already been deleted from Goodreads, this was an especially bad move, since it only served to highlight their fake-seeming aspects.
But Joe was probably panicked at being branded a possible child predator on the internet, and acted foolishly. Another reason why you SHOULD NEVER RESPOND. Try to get Booklikes or Goodreads or Amazon to remove libelous remarks, but don’t bother contacting the person who’s libeling you.
It was at this point that new author Gavin H. decided to get into the act and make himself look good in the eyes of the bullies. He wrote a one star review on Amazon for Joe’s book, containing some highly defamatory content. The review has since been removed by Amazon.
What did Joe do? In spite of his previous experience, and in spite of the fact that he had been contacted privately by friendly Goodreaders who warned him the bullies could not be reasoned with, he decided .
After that, there was between Joe and Gavin:
But by this time, Gavin had already seized the opportunity to start posting on several bully blogs, in an attempt to get some attention by calling another author offensive names. He immediately started milking it for all it was worth.
Woohoo! No less a crazy bully than Grimlock downloaded his book, because she wants to support him!
Gavin, you’d think, is a guy who would never, ever sock puppet. Or would he?
Check out . It has an average rating of 4.56. 78% are five stars. His book must be pretty amazing!
But let’s look more closely at some of his reviews and ratings.
Here’s Desiree’s profile, who gave the book five stars:
And here’s Chris, who also gave it 5 stars:
You’ll notice several things, besides the fact that they have avatars of attractive young women.
These accounts were all opened in November 2013, about a month after Gavin’s book was published.
They were opened in France.
They have no friends.
They have very few books.
They have very few reviews, usually between 2 and 4, but one of them is always a five star for Gavin’s book.
We counted seven such profiles, opened in France in November 2013, no friends, few reviews, five stars for Gavin’s book. We counted another five opened from Lombard, IL, but which fit the same profile in all other respects. There might be more, but we lost count because their overwhelming sameness made them a blur in our minds. But check them out for yourselves! Gavin’s book has 55 ratings, 45 of them 5 stars! which is kind of odd considering that he has racked up a large number of one star reviews on Amazon which make very similar points about his bad writing. But Goodreaders give him five stars almost unanimously! Remember how it was Amazon reviews that supposedly could not be trusted?
Why is Goodreads allowing Gavin’s horde of sock puppet reviews to stand?
Why are his bully friends not saying anything about it?
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