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You may remember that a few days ago, Mike Bayard, a Representative of Belkin that works with online retailers, had been posting jobs on Amazon’s Mechnical Turk asking people to write fake, positive reviews.  Since this was discovered over the weekend, Belkin wasn’t able to give any sort of comment until the week started again.  Today, the President, Mark Reynoso, issued a letter apologizing for Bayard.

Here is a copy of the letter:

Letter from the President: Product Reviews

Belkin has always held itself to the highest standards of corporate ethics and its employees to the highest standards of personal integrity. Similarly, we support our online user community in discussion and reviews of our products, whether the commentary is good or bad. So, 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 website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.

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.

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.

It’s also important to recognize that our retail partners had no knowledge of, or participation in, these postings.

Once again, we apologize for this occurrence, and we will work earnestly to regain the trust we have lost.

Sincerely,

Mark Reynoso

It’s kind of funny how he says “one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk” he uses “may have” like this might not have taken place.  It looks like this is one desperate man for the public’s forgiveness.  Nearly every tech site out there covered this in one way or another so many, many people know about this incident and I wouldn’t be surprised if this yields serious repercussions for Belkin.  If you have any thoughts or comments on this matter, be sure to let us know in the comments.

Read [Belkin]