A criminologist from Scotland tracked down and confronted a man for leaving one-star reviews on his books.
Professor David Wilson's most recent book, Murder at Home, has a solid 4.5/5 rating on Amazon with over 9,000 reviews, but was subject to a one-star review from anonymous user, 'Junius'.
"'Junius' clearly hated my books," Wilson told The Times.
"Over the years, I’d become used to his scathing one-star reviews appearing on Amazon every time I had a new one published."
"The anonymous account had become my online nemesis," he told The Times.
Wilson felt that the online attacks were personal.
"Junius seemed to take things too far. They seemed aimed at my credibility as much as any factual errors I might have made," he told The Times.
"His one-star review of my new book immediately made an impact on the average scores, influencing the measures used by Amazon to rank new books and threatening to reduce sales."
The 'troll' described his work as "low quality" with "poor research", and something which "would disgrace an undergraduate dissertation".
"It was also crushing. No matter how many books you’ve written, you tend to remember the bad reviews, not the favourable ones," Wilson told The Times.
Instead of feeling down about the situation, the criminologist decided to do what he was good at and solve the mystery.
"I surmised that he was a historian or at least had a degree in history. Handily, he signed off his reviews with the hint of an address - 'London, Middlesex' - although there was no trace of his name," he explained.
I typed 'author', 'Dick Turpin' and 'Jacobite rebellion' into the bar of a search engine.
"Up popped several authors who had dabbled in these different areas. One caught my eye because he worked in Middlesex - the historic county that now forms part of west London: Jonathan Oates."
According to The Times, Wilson managed to get a hold of Oates on the phone, and the fellow author immediately apologised and said: "I’m so sorry. I apologise, I know. I’m so, so sorry."
"This time, on the phone, Oates and I discussed how, if I had made factual errors, he could have emailed me at my university: I would gladly have corrected them and acknowledged his help," Wilson shared with The Times.
"We talked about how it was clearly unethical to review the work of another author, and as a trained historian who has a PhD from Reading University - he should know better."
Jonathan Oates admitted that he was too "harsh" and has since apologised.
