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On Monday I posted about a story that was breaking about a Belkin representative paying for positive reviews on Amazon. Well, as it turns out there is now more to the story than meets the eye.

A Beklin Wi-Fi Router Product

As I was going through my Google Reader I came across the headline over at Corporate Eye: Exposed – Belkin Pays for Positive Consumer Reviews which goes into detail about the paid review story but even more in-depth. It looks like the company also went over to a few other popular sites to get some much need press:

As it turns out, Belkin has been soliciting positive reviews for awhile, and the company has also been paying people to write positive reviews on a variety of sites, including Buy.com and Newegg.  As you can imagine, once the cat was out of the bag and a screenshot of the actual task (see it here) began circulating across the Internet, the Belkin president, Mark Reynoso, had to respond and apologize (read his apology letter here).  However, the negative PR wouldn’t stop there.  Next, a Belkin employee spilled the beans to Gizmodo, telling them that Belkin has been soliciting and paying for positive consumer reviews for a very long time (read it here).

What’s even worse though is Mark Reynoso’s response where he stats:

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.
- We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.

While it was a great attempt it is hard to believe that this was a one time incident as seen over at Gizmodo. Again, as I mentioned before this is going to hurt them over all and in today’s economy it’ll be hard to get back the trust.

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