This reminds me of a post by an author who had his own book's prize on Amazon decreased in a bidding war between bots [1]. It's a different matter but the post

This reminds me of a post by an author who had his own book's prize on Amazon decreased in a bidding war between bots [1]. It's a different matter but the post begins with this: Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing. A story about computer science and other improbable things. It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read. [1] http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/02/bots-seized-control.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/02/bots-seized-control.html