• Belkin Paid for Good Reviews on Amazon

    Belkin Paid for Good Reviews on Amazon

    Techtree News Staff, Jan 19, 2009 1815 hrs IST

    Belkin was found paying users about 65 cents to write good product reviews at the Amazon Mechanical Turk website

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Belkin's Business Development Representative, Michael Bayard, was caught offering money for 100% good reviews about Belkin products at Amazon.com and other e-tailing sites. The Daily Background uncovered this news from Amazon's Mechanical Turk website. After the buzz created on the web, Belkin acted swiftly and removed the postings and reviews. Also, Mark Reynoso, Belkin's President reacted to the incident by writing a letter in which he apologized for the unethical practice.


 


 


 


Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a service where registered users get paid for petty computing tasks provided by requestors. A request from Mike Bayard asked a user to review a product and give a 100% rating (as high as possible). Basically, the post insisted that users write fake positive reviews about Belkin products and give them 5 out of 5 rating. In return, the users got paid 65 cents.


 


Fake reviews were posted on Buy.com and Newegg.com besides Amazon.com, and thus mislead a buyer to purchase what could be a bad product. Soon after this shocking discovery, Michael Bayard's Linkedin profile disappeared, and the product reviews post and the fake reviews were pulled down from the web.


 


Belkin President, Mark Reynoso wrote a public letter apologizing for unethical practices.


"...it was with great surprise and dismay that we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment."


 


Paying to write good reviews for a product, especially a bad one, is unethical and totally self-degrading. This shakes the faith that consumers place on existing and upcoming organizations.

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Discussion Board
(2) Comments
Richard
,redmond, on Jan 19, 2009 08:54 PM
Beklin employees was cheating customers with false reviews, for the purpose of selling and pushing their products... And now that they have been caught, Beklin wants to claim they didn't know... so what about all the customers who paid and bought crappy products having read these reviews? And what's to stop Beklin like so many other businesses from doing this again? The truth is, Beklin isn't the only one cheating here! It's no longer important for businesses to make quality products, it's only how cheap can we make the products, and then push them out into the marketplace, using false propaganda! I will NEVER again trust Beklin or Microsoft! Both are evil, both lie and both cheat! Windows 7 is Vista DRM! Just like Beklin likes to cheat customers telling them, "Wow" our products works for sure... When pigs fly!
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Lyn Lydon
,Santa ana, on Jan 21, 2009 01:13 AM
Sounds like you may be Belkin's competition. Large corporations don't always know what stupid employees may do!
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