Harry Potter and the Internet Scam
Pop culture used to suck in victims. E-books of series are not real.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
BY : Brian Ashe
Once again popular culture is being used to try to scam as many people as possible. Viruses and scams have used popular athletes and celebrities such as Anna Kournikova and major news events such as the tsunami that has destroyed so much of Asia. Now they are targeting yet another popular medium, books.
The long awaited sixth book in the blockbuster Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is the latest to be used by nefarious scammers to trick you into providing your credit card information. A site (http://www.harrybooks.info) was created to purportedly sell E-Books of both book five and book six in the series. According to The Leaky Cauldron, a popular Harry Potter Fan site, they received a lot of visitor feed back about this scam. They also learned that the site will "consistently state that they can't charge the card - and that's after they've obtained the credit card number". Moderators at The Leaky Cauldron took action to notify the right people to have this site taken down.
The Author of the series, J.K. Rowling, has also responded to this potential threat to her fans. On her website she confirmed that there is no current offer of any of her books in E-book format. She went on to say that "I would bet the original manuscript of 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' itself that this will not be the last attempt to con HP fans before the publication of book six on 16th July."
So if you are a fan of the series you will just have to wait until the official release to get your fix. Keep your eyes peeled for any other offers like this one and run away when you see them. There are plenty of reliable and safe places to get these books.
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