Scam campaign camouflages as John Wick movie-based ebooks on Kindle store

• Fake ebooks with John Wick 3 cover images redirect users to third-party websites.
• Most of these links had prices ranging from £0.99 to as high as £15.25.

A new spam campaign has apparently targeted John Wick fans on Amazon’s Kindle store. Miscreants have created fake ebooks in the store that resembles the third installment of the movie. When users click on these links after buying them, they will be taken to a series of third-party websites which ask for payments to view the movie.

According to Malwarebytes which uncovered this scam, these ebooks come with a price tag ranging from as low as £0.99 to around £15.25. On top of this, the fake ebooks flood the results page when users search for John Wick.

“Roughly 40 or more individual items uploaded from around January 25 to February 2, each one from a different “author.” At first glance, you might think you’re looking at movies, thanks to the play button icon on each image preview. The fact that each entry is called something along the lines of “John Wick 3: free movie HD” probably helps, too,” wrote senior researcher Christopher Boyd from the security firm.

As mentioned earlier, upon clicking the links in the ebooks, users are redirected to a movie streaming site called Livemovie[.]xyz/play[.]php?movie=458156. When they click on ‘Play’ button, a login/register pop-up would be displayed. This again takes them to another fake media content website and the process of redirection from one site to another goes on with no signs of the actual movie. Ultimately, users are duped of their money.

While Malwarebytes has notified Amazon of this issue, the e-commerce giant is continuing to face the issue of fake ebooks on its online store.