Winners & Scammer Announcement

The winners of the RW: Quince giveaway are:

Heather

Gutterball

Sherri

Winners, please send your full name and ship-to address to LynnViehl@aol.com, and I'll get your winnings out to you.

I've been expecting to be hit for quite a while, but up until recently I've not had a problem with scammers entering my contests and giveaways. In this case, the scammer is one person who pretends to be six or twelve or thirty by setting up false blog profiles, and uses all of the identities to enter one contest or giveaway and increase their odds of winning. Often scammers work in small groups, too, sharing information with like-minded cheats and pooling their resources. Usually an author finds out they're being contest-scammed after a growing percentage of their winners all appear to be living at the same address or next door to each other.

Listen, I'm not interested in exposing anyone or pointing fingers. Nor am I going to come up with any sort of complicated registration or validation process for my giveaways. And no way are scammers going to stop me from holding giveaways and contests. What I will do is put comments back on moderation and start deleting suspicious-looking entries as they come in. I will also make a list of suspicious-looking identities and profile addies and send it to every other author I know, and ask them to do the same to all the authors they know.

However, if you would like a free book, and are willing to play fair, you're welcome to enter any giveaway or contest here -- just quit cheating and enter only once, like everyone else does. I give away a lot of books here at PBW, so odds are pretty good that you'll win one. And think of how much better you'll feel about yourself if you win it fairly.