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For a number of years, Vortex Centrum, publishers of, amongst other things, World Money Laundering Report watched as fraudsters downloaded versions of WMLR, copied them, returned them to Amazon for a refund, and then advertised for sale the copies they had made

Amazon seemed powerless to stop it. So the company withdrew its titles from Kindle.

It was ironic as Vortex Centrum was one of the first electronic publishers on the 'web and World Money Laundering Report was launched in 1999 for electronic distribution only.

It was an irony that the company was not happy with and nor were some customers who prefer their books in soft copy.

Now Vortex Centrum has a solution. Tested on the highly successful launch of the 25th Anniversary Edition of "How Not To Be A Money Launderer", the company has begun to release new titles by Nigel Morris-Cotterill.

Called P.Y.O. books customers get the same print files as are used to produce the paperback version of the book. P.Y.O. stands for Print Your Own.

But there are a couple of variations: first the P.Y.O. file includes the front and the back covers and, of course, a limited licence. It also includes personalisation in the form of the name used to purchase the book.

The first P.Y.O. title is "Cut-Throats and Brigands: Blood on the (Wall) Street".

Nigel Morris-Cotterill said "we tried to solve the problem of copyright theft but not only did Amazon not have any mechanism to identify suspicious activity (despite our having identified and informed the company of a pattern that the criminals adopted) and the criminals using Cloudflare to protect their identity, something Cloudflare refused to investigate or assist us with, we were left with no choice.

"It was far more than a question of our loss of revenue: it was that my name and the titles of my books were used by criminals to attract people, via Cloudflare's destination obscuring service, to websites that may have been used for phishing or, worse, the automatic download to users' computers of malware such a virus, trojan or hacker's tools.

"So, the mechanism we have is simple: the order is placed via Stripe, Stripe send us the order with the customer's name and e-mail address and we produce a personalised version which is then emailed to the customer. It's partly a manual process so it's not an instant download but at least we and hopefully our customers are protected, to some degree, against fraud and malware."

Details of "Cut-Throats and Brigands: Blood on the (Wall) Street" and how to order your P.Y.O. copy are here: https://vortexcentrum.com/elan/cut-throats_and_brigands

Company address and contact information

Full information and booking www.vortexcentrum.com