Belkin employee caught gaming reviews on consumer websites

By Paul Smith

If you’re a two-bit, snake oil-peddling scumbag, then paying people to act as your stooge would be entirely expected of you, but still completely wrong. If you’re a global manufacturer of computer hardware on the other hand, then you really should know better.

That didn’t stop Mike Bayard, a Business Development Executive at Belkin – the folk who make wireless routers and various other gizmos you’ll find flooding off the shelves at PC World. The Daily Background discovered a post by Bayard on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a site where you can perform tech tasks for people in return for cash. Bayard wasn’t after anything too technical though; instead he offered to pay people to write positive reviews for a specific Belkin product:

picture 8 Belkin employee caught gaming reviews on consumer websites

Oh dear. “Always give a 100% rating… write as if you own the product and are using it… mark any other negative reviews as not helpful.” That’s not great form for the likes of Belkin. Not surprisingly, when The Daily Background tackled Belkin about Bayard’s actions, they knew nothing about it:

picture 91 Belkin employee caught gaming reviews on consumer websites

No word on what has become of Baynard; while he’s hardly the first person to try gaming peer review systems, there can’t be many to attempt it on behalf of their multi-million pound global corporation.

[The Daily Background] via [Crunchgear]

Tags: amazon, belkin, mechanical turk
Posted in News January 19th, 2009 | 9 Comments

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 4:17 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Belkin employee caught gaming reviews on consumer websites”

Posted by I P Freely | January 19th, 2009 at 4:54 pm

I love BitterWallet, its the best blog on the net, other blogs are pooey. Long Live BitterWallet.

Thats £5.21 please.
Posted by MB | January 19th, 2009 at 5:42 pm

How do they know it is him? Could it not have been done by a rival, to make him look bad?
Posted by Yaser | January 19th, 2009 at 6:00 pm

typical of a pcworld supplier, however their products look right in poundland . .

as for PCW, they had a ‘discounted’ travel charger for £24.97,the type packaged as standard with the £10 handsets . .
Posted by Jordan | January 19th, 2009 at 7:32 pm

reminds me a little of this story … http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/councillor-used-pseudonym-to-praise-own-work-1333346.html
Posted by Mike | January 19th, 2009 at 8:59 pm

He admitted it I believe and apologized
Amazon reviews mean nothing because people can vote when havent brought anything
Games with SecureRom, iPod vs others, Xbox 360 vs PS3 voting something low when they have never used it
Posted by well well | January 19th, 2009 at 9:14 pm

Seems like shooting yourself in the foot. Any review now positive about belkin will be looked at as though a lie which means the negative stuff must be true.. Guy sound like an utter pratt who has done more harm then good. If found to be true he should be put in prison, what good is a apology if you’ve bought their crap because of a falsified review.
Posted by darkgerbil1 | January 19th, 2009 at 9:42 pm

ain’t nuthin’ but a peanut
Posted by The Real Bob | January 21st, 2009 at 7:27 am

I’ve got 2 Belkin wireless network cards and the one running under XP is absolute shite, they’re the only Belkin things I’ve ever bought as generally Belkin is synonymous with overpriced turds, and apparently it rings true for the network cards too.
Posted by Hotel reviews can’t be trusted, TripAdvisor won’t say how many | BitterWallet | July 18th, 2009 at 3:23 pm

[...] reviews of products are sometimes made up by the companies responsible for them. Woah. Occasionally the dozier offenders have been caught in the act, but sometimes they’re difficult to spot. The question is how many reviews on any one site [...]