Employee alleges Belkin review scam

Belkin has been receiving a lot of unfavorable attention recently for reportedly offering to pay for favorable Amazon product reviews. The company's president, Mark Reynoso, posted a letter confirming the behavior, but attributing it to a single employee.

"It was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Web site inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment," Reynoso wrote.

"Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. 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. We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened."

Yesterday, someone claiming to be a (quite disgruntled) Belkin employee wrote to Gizmodo, saying that the Amazon review affair was not an isolated event.

"...For years it has been pressed upon ALL Belkin employees to do whatever is needed to get good product reviews and good press. Everything from sending blog writers a device with custom firmware that hides known bugs yet claiming it to be official release firmware, faking hardware logo certifications (specifically Apple and MSFT), releasing blatantly inaccurate data from test results making our devices look superior to others, to placing "tailored" reviews of our products into places visible to consumers (as reported Amazon, etc), as well as writing poor reviews of competitors products. In the past there have even monthly awards given to Business Units who achieved the most positive reviews, regardless as to the products rate of customer returns. The concept being that even if a consumer has been mislead by a review or data on the box, the chance that they will return the product is very little. In fact, our products are such junk, when an internal survey was done, it was found that the majority of Belkin employees purchased competitors products for home use, even with ours being offered free, as they are of such poor quality.

"We have paid magazines for positive reviews, made custom devices or fixtures for use at trade shows to ensure quality demos. One such example would be a fixture that runs hidden cable to a TV or audio receiver, yet claiming the broadcast is coming from a wireless transmitter, or through a USB hub."

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