July 9, 2009

Fake Amazon Reviews - DeLonghi has them removed

Ouch - nothing like getting caught offering what seem to be a little bit out-of-bounds opinions on Amazon reveiws. It seems that a gentleman was shopping for a DeLonghi espresso machine and found some gushing reviews on the Amazon site by a reviewer T. Carpenter of Stillwater NJ; then he noticed that this person also reviewed twelve other Delonghi products, giving them equally gushing reviews.

The Wall St Journal reports that the reviewer (Tara Carpenter) is actually an employee of the DeLonghi firm and that they have since asked Amazon to remove the reviews. While she was listed on the corporate site as the communications Manager, she is no longer listed there. According to the WSJ, she is still employed there. At this writing, she is in LinkedIn as a Communication Manager at DeLonghi. Check out Russ Taylor's blog for more details and the original report.

In the end, the problem for Ms. Carpenter is that she used her own name, because I am pretty sure that you can hire people to write reviews for you, making the obvious link back to the firm a lot harder to connect.

It seems like DeLonghi is stepping up and working to cleanse the system of these reviews. I think DeLonghi had better talk to the folks at Target to get her reviews removed from their site also; I did a quick search and found two up there; see below.

Buyer beware - those reviews may not be the trustworthy reviews that you thought they might be.