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Belkin's President Apologizes For Faked Reviews
remove office writes "After I wrote about how Belkin's Amazon.com sales rep Mike Bayard had been paying for fake reviews of his company's products using Mechanical Turk, hundreds of readers across the Web expressed their outrage. As a result of the online outcry, Belkin's president Mark Reynoso has issued a statement apologizing and saying that 'this is an isolated incident' and that 'Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this.' Amazon moved swiftly to remove several reviews on Belkin products it believed were fraudulent. But now fresh evidence of astroturfing has surfaced, by the same Belkin executive."
...the same folks that gave us the spam router. Why am I not surprised?
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
"Belkin does not participate in . . . unethical practices like this."
paraphrase: We don't do what we just did.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
We've seen this over and over recently for companies and politics. Some underling gets caught doing underhanded stuff, the company/government hang them out to dry, then it comes to light they knew about it the whole time.
Just remember this the next time your boss asks for something ethically questionable but says they will take full responsibility.
. . . that you found out. So very, very sorry. Luckily, we've stopped doing it now! So you can stop looking. There's nothing else to find."
"Goddammit, I told you to stop! I'm sorry you found out about this one also!"
Yeah, I'm sorry too, Belkin. After the whole spam router thing I stopped using your products for a few years, but then thought, hey, sometimes people screw up. Mistakes were made, I haven't heard anything bad about them for a while. Why not?
Well, now I know why not. One time is a mistake, two times is a failure to learn, three times is waiting for you to let your guard down to sneak a fast one past again. Won't make that mistake again!
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I enjoy at least 1 Belkin product: Nostromo SpeedPad n52
And while Belkin does not pay me, I can say good things about it. I think it's their most popular product, as it's a big hit with the WoW crowd as well.
How do we know this was the real President of the company and that it wasn't some actor hired to do a fake apology?
Once could be an "isolated incident". But this is the second big scam involving Belkin, in the wake of the router that basically had built in adware...
Seems to me that Belkin has a culture of corporate corruption over there. The best way to assure us that they have realized their mistake and to correct the problem is for heads to roll. Seems to me they have corrupt management. That needs to go.
Corporatism != Free Market
They're so full of crap. It's funny how Belkin has "isolated incidents" seemingly several times a year. They obviously have a corporate environment that breeds this sort of thing. I put them on my "evil company, do not buy" permanent list when the news of the spam router came out back in 2003, and haven't bought so much as a cable from them since.
Now, where's my money?
-.-
Is the FTC looking into this? Who's the new head of the FTC in the Obama admin?
Ok, look, it is great this story broke and the CEO apologized. But now, the new claims all center around a username that matches this guys real name. Now, it could be legitimate, but this is f'ing slashdot of all places and you are going to immediately accept "well the online nickname matches his real name, it must be him" like the same bunch of morons that sees "Obama caught naked with Bush daughters" in their Inbox and thinks "Well, it must be true, I gotta see this" and clicks on the link. Seriously... I mean...wouldn't it be a pretty good stunt for some internet troll to use that guys name to post positive reviews in light of the original claims? Just because the story didn't gain traction right away doesn't mean other people didn't also know about it before the story DID get widespread coverage.
How the hell is slashdot going to link front page "HAHA caught again" to a damned blog that says "well the user's nickname matches the sales guy, it MUST be him". Now, I'm not even saying it isn't him, it is entirely possible he is that much of a dumbass and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it was him. However, calling that article "Fresh evidence" is a pretty far stretch. "Suspicious behavior" maybe, but "fresh evidence of wrongdoing" is a bit of that guilty until proven innocent that only seems to be OK when being applied against people you don't like.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
It is not illegal and has the same morality as a regular advertisement IMHO.
A regular advertisement is something you know is paid for, so you know it's one big lie-but-not-as-the-FTC-defines-it. The thing with these reviews is that they're actively interfering with the spread of accurate information (note that accurate information is rather critical to the proper functioning of markets), rather than just spewing their own obvious garbage that people can know to ignore.
Belkin's president Mark Reynoso has issued a statement apologizing and saying that 'this is an isolated incident' and that 'Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this.'
Phew, for a second I thought I was going to have to use some doublethink to convince myself that Belkin didn't do exactly what he just claimed they never do!!!
Mr. Reynoso's apology means nothing. He's only sorry because they were caught; as with most people.
It doesn't matter if they apologize because a business that engages in that sort of unethical behavior will not hesitate to do it again (unless it effects their pocketbooks, in that case they'll just be more careful to not be caught). Once a cheater always a cheater.
Somebody in the MS Intellectual Property department must be asleep on the job. I could have sworn that that Microsoft had a patent on that particular 'business method'...
Excuse me, INAL however I seem to remember when ethics were discussed way back in college that when one acts as an agent of the company, one is acting on behalf of the company in a legal sense. Therefore, since the exec was repeatedly buying reviews I would hardly consider it to be an "isolated incident" (an isolated incident would be asking a friend or neighbor to write up a review in exchange for a round of beers, for example). Also, I would consider that since a Belkin exec was buying those reviews and encouraging this unethical and immoral behavior, it is wholeheartedly officially, if surreptitiously, endorsed by Belkin.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Regular crappy products. I never entered them on my EVIL company list, because they were already on my "Products don't work as advertised" list.
I had three products of theirs out of the first four I encountered that plain just didn't work as advertised. After that, I marked them "Don't buy".
I found this /. article very useful and informative. I road tested it on my iPhone and it exceeded my expectations. It exceeded my expectations and was a lot of fun to use. Works with my hard drive, too.
Five stars.
CDR Taco, where's my 65 cents?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
He gets paid $.65 for every apology he makes!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Makes sense, the majority of people are actually nice and honest. No matter how easy cynicism is: we are social animals and *want* to contribute to society, despite having selfish desires, too. Besides the proof is in the pudding: if you use the Amazon review system you get a lot of useful information. Of course you can't just look at the number of stars - if you look at the reviews you see the issues people had, you can also see whether a review is just fluff. If in doubt you can check the author's other reviews and look for bias.
Why does this surprise anyone that companies would put reviews of their own products ?
Does this surprise anyone? I doubt it. Nevertheless only very unethical companies would actually do it, and there is a price to pay (e.g. a lot of negative attention) once they are found out.
[...] has the same morality as a regular advertisement IMHO.
I suspect you are pretty much alone with that view. (Not counting Mike Bayard.)
What do you think that people in marketing department spend their time on, while idling ?
If they are smart they probably don't do somthing which smears their company's reputation and gets them fired or demoted. (Bad performance is a good way to get fired, regardless whether your company is ethical or not...)
Fake reviews is a big problem and definitely not unique to Belkin. Beware of another type of dishonest practice: the retaining of good reviews and tossing of poor ones.
I purchased an iRobot Scooba floor-cleaning robot for $450. Quite an investment, but the reviews were all great so I felt the investment was worthwhile. The unit worked well until shortly after the 1-year warranty expired. When I contacted customer service, I was offered a new unit for a $340 but no repair alternative whatsoever.
So I posted a poor review - one which never showed up on their website....
Keeping your job and getting the paycheck is the reward. If we really took punishing poor ethics seriously, we wouldn't have the problem. How can you seriously enforce that, though, when you have foxes guarding the henhouse? Can you seriously say you would trust the Congresscritters to be the guardians of good governmental ethics? Therefore, it is really up to us, the voters, and judging by who we send to the Capitol Hill, we're not up to the job.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
The next time I went in, they offered me a pirated copy of the latest update to QEMM. I said no thanks, went home, and my wife ordered me a copy of the software from Ingram Micro. Several days later I started to hear the bad news. The development manager had gone around the company and updated every desktop machine in the place with a single unprotected floppy. The next day, each machine as it was turned on started erasing all files on the hard disk, deltree c:\*.* /S style. This development manager couldn't quite believe what he was seeing so he went around and turned on each and every machine in the place and watched while they creamed themselves, one after the next.
The moral of this story is obvious. I was working for the guy and he insisted that I take the QEMM floppy home with me. I admit I did, but I threw it away when I got home. He called me in a panic Saturday morning with a sad story and asked if I had used the software. I can not say whether he was happy for me or not when I said I had not and had just ordered a clean copy.
So this is not about covering your ass with an email or a letter. It is about doing the right things for the right reasons and being able to see quickly thereafter the benefits of honesty. I cannot say who this company was because I signed an NDA, but you would recognize the name if I told you. I am not perfect. I have made mistakes. I have sinned in my life. But by this time I had learned some and was straight arrow about software licensing. I still am and have not to this day downloaded any MP3 music that violates copyrights. People don't understand my position about this, and I can only try to lead by example. But this story about the QEMM floppy that spread the virus and destroyed every desktop in the corporation is one hundred percent true, I swear it. On a Bible.