MSE News: Ban for firms posing as happy customers online

ormus

most of em are easy to spot.
they must employ complete numpties.

Horasio

I can usually tell this is happening, it seems so scripted.

I also sense on the vent threads there are professional trolls, who work for the offending companies, join forums of this type in order to try and make the venter look bad and catch them out by picking on minor irrelevant faults. Usually they have a group of them gang up on the venter as well. I wish MSE would deal with this as well as it spoils an otherwise very good forum.

spaceboy

Never just go with the recomendation of one person on here unless you know they are reliable. Definitely pays to do some google research of your own first before buying.

dragonthoughts

I have to agree that if you have strong evidence of companies doing this that naming and shaming is good. Negative publicity on a big site, such as MSE is likely to have a negative impact on sales - the reverse of their intent, and may deter other companies trying to repeat the act, in case they are caught.

MSE would be able to help protect other sites from the less scrupulous posters, by keeping a watch-list, including identifying info, such as IP addresses, user IDs and company names.

For a forum that I run, this would be invaluable information. Experience shows that these type of posters seem to follow common patterns.

TurkishDelight

I remember when a certain chain of fizzy pop brands were doing a mobile phone promotion and every 5 minutes there would be a new user spamming about it.

On the advice above, for those who are curious, it rhymed with santa :A

Kind of shocked me as I assumed it was not legit, but it turned out it was. Don't know if they were running a refer a friend promo or what, but that was a busy day for the spam button

Sadly, while it may seem pretty obvious to most people, there will always be a newbie who falls for it, hence why they do it.

Tight_Git_3

Sony Store - Westfield Centre, Derby.
I had truly terrible service from them, posted a thread about it, then a few weeks later up pops a recently joined member, telling us all how great their customer srvice was...
Member has a total of 6 posts, half of which were on this thread, and all on the same day.

bribrian

Name & shame or it's all fantasy...................

TurkishDelight

One particularly stupid one: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/member.html?u=967735

mcwarre

So what is the actual point of this thread?

Silk

bribrian wrote: »

Name & shame or it's all fantasy...................

Hi Brian,
We've had a few interesting escapades on here regarding mobile phone companies which test the laws of coincidence :rotfl:
Anyway to name one that does this sort of thing is CPW and their related companies. Theres lots of instances on the net but his one is a good example and quite funny when you think about it....
http://www.mrdaz.com/carphone-warehouse-employee-lies/