Hee. Free entertainment! Thanks.
Yeah, there's a lot of review cheating and such going on at Amazon.
Threads where authors are found out pop up every so often on the Kindle and Kindle Books discussions boards and it's a useful way to find out who to avoid buying books from if authors who are not necessarily the same as the "caught" ones go around defending the practice on the grounds that they're poor downtrodden creative souls who need all the marketing help they can get.
I never bother looking at the 5-stars on Amazon because they're probably mostly just made-up lies anyway and the chances that a newbie amateur book is really "BESTEST THING I READ, EVAR!!!!!" for multiple people is very low, unless all 50 reviewers have only ever read that book and a Jack Chick Tract.
ETA: Stanek may not have sockpuppeted all 200 reviews himself. According to this thread in the Amazon Kindle Books discussion boards on
another suspicious author who had 200+ glowing reviews deleted, there are a couple of MAKE MONEY @ HOME!!!!! services which offer desperately unethical authors reviews for pay.
Also, remember that guy who wrote Zombiestan who claimed to have had his books picked up for republication by local Indian publishers? It turns out that he, too, is a review faker who made the mistake of
defensively responding to a negative review pretending to be "just another reader" but under his author account.