Two of anonymous Belkin employees have come back with replies to the statement released by Belkin's president Mark Reynoso about faked product reviews. Belkin has supposedly paid for positive reviews, gave products with custom firmware to reviewers in order to hide bugs, faked hardware certification logos, wrote poor reviews of competitor's products and backed out of CES for lack of funding as inferred from the employees post.
An anonymous person claiming to be a former Belkin employee has commented in response to the statement released by Belkin's president Mark Reynoso about faked product reviews. Below is the published comment:
Having worked for Belkin for 10 years and this is only the tip of the ice berg, I used to do worse than this to gain market share and inside information on the competition. Belkin WAS the hands down leader in the market and was the greatest place to work. I can remember walking through CES, Comdex, MacWorld, or any retailers corporate office and watching my competition gasp in awe when Belkin was in the house. The day Chet brought back Mark Renoso was the second worst decision he has made (first was not manufacturing network cards when Linksys got out the the printer sharing business). Mark is the King of micro mangers and NOTHING at Belkin gets approved or done without his stamp of approval. I was once a person that did dirty deeds for Mark Renoso in the market place to gain share and information. I even kept hard copies of emails with such requests. The best thing Belkin can do to repair this major damage is to get rid of Mark Renoso. He is the only one pulling the puppet strings. Jeff Mc
Gizmodo also recently published an email from an anonymous person claiming to work for Belkin currently which sheds light on Belkin's supposedly dirty practices
While never mentioned in an "official" policy, 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. Infact, 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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