Reputation Management Gone Bad: Company Fined For Faked Reviews

[engine]

Reputation Management Gone Bad: Company Fined For Faked Reviews [nytimes.com]

Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, has reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web, the New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday.

The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as an independent sources.

One e-mail message, discovered by the attorney general’s office, told employees to “devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client.”

The company will pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the state. It has also agreed to stop publishing anonymous reviews on Web sites in the voices of satisfied customers and to identify any content created by employees, the statement said.

[Whitey]

Who's really responsible , and who's benefiting from the resulting publicity :

TripAdvisor Warns of Hotels Posting Fake Reviews

[abcnews.go.com...]

[ogletree]

One down a zillion more to go. This problem is way to Rampant and most companies are not so stupid about it. The local market is full of this stuff. I find it funny when you see a list of local companies and most have zero reviews and the few that do have 5/5 with rave revies. This really means nothing other than show people how not to write fake reviews.