Belkin Issues Apology For Paid Review Incident

Belkin issued an apology Sunday for what it calls "an isolated incident" involving one of its employees soliciting positive reviews via the Amazon Mechanical Turk site. Apparently the requester, Michael Bayard, is a business development representative at Belkin. He posted a request on the Mechanical Turk for people to post positive reviews of a Belkin product on Amazon.com and give it a 5/5 and then mark any negative reviews as not helpful. The request offered people 65 cents per review and stated it was not necessary to have owned or used the product. The product, a USB 2.0 hub and dongle, had been rated at 1.5/5. Bayard had also been soliciting reviews on Newegg.com and Buy.com as well. Belkin issued an apology and said it was working with it partners to remove all of the bogus reviews.

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Bosco on January 19, 2009 09:41PM Wow a whole 65 cents. Maybe if it was $65 it might have went undetected lol. reply to this

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