Belkin rep paid for phony reviews
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Boy, is Mark Reynoso’s face red.
He’s the president of Belkin which claims to have, “an extensive range of innovations designed to give computer and consumer electronics users seamless integration in their homes, cars, and on the go”.
But, “Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this,” it says in a response to claims by Arlen Parsa in The Daily Background that Belkin is/was paying 65 cents for “good reviews on NewEgg and Amazon,” as CrunchGear puts it in the form of a question.
“We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction,” insists Reynoso.
“We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened.”
Belkin’s statement, quoted in The Daily Background, goes on »»»
We want to stress that this is an isolated incident and to re-instill trust with you, we have taken the following courses of action:
We`ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.
By way of a small digression, if you’ve never heard of the Amazon Merchanical Turk, it’s, “one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do,” explains the Wikipedia.
“Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk`s Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the somewhat limited Mturk Requester site.”
With that as background, “I was checking out this website the other day and I made a few bucks by hand-transcribing a few videos,” says Parsa. But then he came across the ad on the right, a, “request from somebody named Mike Bayard to review a product and ‘give [it] a 100% rating (as high as possible)’.”
Users were paid 65 cents for each positive review, says The Daily Background, and, “There are dozens of these requests from this Mike Bayard guy on Mechanical Turk.”
What was he touting?
“The link is to an Amazon.com listing for a Belkin router which has consistently gotten bad reviews in the past from users who say that the product is ‘loaded with Bugs, goes on & off whenever it feels like, and comes at a hefty price’,” says Parsen, adding:
“Bayard is the Business Development Representative at Belkin International in charge of ‘Sales of Belkin products to major .com accounts such as Amazon.com.’ In other words, this guy is paying people to post fake good reviews of his own products which, according to most people who actually use them, suck (and ironically, he’s using Amazon`s own service to screw up their own review system).”
CrunchGear – Belkin paying 65 cents for good reviews on NewEgg and Amazon?, January 17, 2009
The Daily Background – Belkin`s Development Rep is Hiring People to Write Fake Positive Amazon Reviews, January 16, 2009
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:07 pm
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