Playster / Playster.Com Deceptive affiliate marketing, bait and switch concerns, copyright abuses, supporting spammy advertisers and bookjackers, claiming to offer PDFs of authors books as a ruse to attract signups to Playster Internet

Playster or Playster.Com is reported for concerns around questionable 'bait and switch' affiliate marketing which generally revolves around third party affiliates (used by Playster) creating spammy websites under hard to trace hosting providers, who promote PDFs of authors works.

This is done without author consent.

The unethical aspect to this scheme is that what happens is that a third [arty affiliate scrapes book content from book catalogues and with Playsters help, creates a slick looking graphic offering the book PDF free as part of a Playster free trial.

However, there are many complaints on the internet about people not being able to cancel memberships and incurring unauthorized credit card charges. There are also other Rip Off Reports about Playster as well:-

http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/playstercom/internet/playstercom-offer-books-they-dont-have-force-to-open-account-then-impossible-to-delet-1246229

Most importantly, they rarely have the books. The bait and switch scam is that the supposed free book is really not thereand instead one must take a free sign up trial (to find out the book is not there AND that the trial is not really free) and thus one is being mislead with a free product to pay money through deceptive advertising.

On their authors page, they claim to have a search function for authors to search for copyright violations, but the link does not work. They do admit to using perfomance advertising networks on that page:-

blog.playster.com/authors-publishers-what-playster-can-do-for-you/

although authors trying to have removed false or misleading listings face an uphill struggle.

They often claim (without admission) the links are disabled, yet appear again the next day via a Google search via another affiliate. Affiliates are not vetted and are often simply Russian or Turkish based spammers creating self-hosted wordpress libraries from scraped content, using reverse proxy servers and the like to avoid DMCA complaints.

Playster sometimes claim not to be able to find the link, whereas this is a ruse for not wanting to disable their profitable, albeit misleading, affiliates. There are many unhappy authors on the net making similar complaints.

There are screenshots detailing the complaints raised.

Playster have not resolved the matter to my satisfaction.