From The Daily Background blog:

Belkin Whistleblower Alleges Systemic Wrongdoing: “This Only Scratches the Surface”

The technology blog Gizmodo just published an email from a person it says is a Belkin employee who wishes to remain anonymous. The email, reprinted in full below, alleges systemic wrongdoing on the part of corporate higher-ups, who the person says encourage dodgy marketing tactics for products which the employee feels are of poor quality:

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.

This has been going on for years. Over the past several years office moral has been dwindling, as it seems to be a common feeling that the company is clearly in a death spiral. In the past month over 10% of the workforce has been laid off (including all QC) as profits have dropped significantly. Further more, the company has been trying to activly back out of paying for the brand new HQ being built in L.A., however they are unable to do so, stretching the companies limited cash even further. Recently, the purchasing of pens, paper clips and post it notes was halted in order to save money. In fact, the company has lost so much money, it was announced in November that a booth at CES 09 would be economically impossible.

Two of the three co-founders of the company quit over the poor direction Belkin as taken, over 70% of the employees in certain business units have quit. It is commonly accepted that current CEO Mark Reynoso is running everything into the ground, while increasing his salary year after year.

This only scratches the surface of the shady tactics and slimy methods Belkin uses. One thing I will say is that this is not the fault of the employees. The average employee makes a very honest attempt at releasing high quality products, however, upper management generally pushes employees so hard to release more products at a faster rate, with a lower production cost, that it is impossible to produce a quality product. It is very common upper management to force a product to be released even though major concerns about the product are well known.

It’s worth saying that I have no information personally to corroborate any of this, although it certainly is an interesting development.

. . . . .

Second High Level Belkin Employee Implicated in Wide-Ranging Review Fraud

Thanks to help from a commenter named Anonymoose, The Daily Background is today able to partially corroborate reports from an anonymous Belkin employee who claimed that the review fraud first reported by The Daily Background last Friday “only scratches the surface.”

Until now, there was only evidence that a single Belkin employee was involved with paying users to post fake reviews on sites like Amazon.com, and posting fake reviews himself. But now a second, much higher level employee can be added to that list: Rudy Magna, Belkin’s National Account Manager. There is also evidence that Mr Manga and the earlier employee coordinated their fake reviewing. See this screenshot of two five star reviews of the same Belkin product posted by the two Belkin employees on the exact same day:

Click here for Google Cache of original page. (Full screenshot of Google cache just in case here).

Belkin’s President Mark Reynoso apologized for the first employee’s behavior when the original occurrences of astroturfing and paying for positive reviews were exposed by TDB, insisting that “this is an isolated incident.” The company did not say whether anyone had been disciplined for the acts however, and scores of readers across hundreds of websites have called for more concrete action to be taken.

Mr Magna engaged in almost identical astroturfed reviews as the ones posted by the company’s Amazon sales rep, Mike Bayard, suggesting that review fraud is a widespread occurrence within the company, as first alleged by a whistleblower within the company who anonymously emailed the blog Gizmodo over the weekend. The evidence of Mr Magna’s involvement is outlined below, complete with links and screenshots.

For full screenshot, click here.

In a post Monday, I revealed, thanks to Anonymoose’s help, that Belkin employee Mike Bayard had been manufacturing his own fraudulent reviews on Amazon.com, in addition to paying others to write them for him. In that post, I suggested that the Amazon.com username B Ekim (which was confirmed to be Bayard’s) and username R. Wood were operated by the same person. They were not: R. Wood is actually Rudy Magna.

Click here for full screenshot. Original source here.

This revelation comes from close examination of Mr Magna’s Amazon Wishlist, where the online retailer publishes his full name (so that friends of Manga’s can be sure that it’s actually him). Mr Magna’s identity as National Account Manager, a major sales position, is confirmed on his profiles on the business bio site Spoke.com, as well as other sites like LinkedIn.

Click here for full screenshot. Original source here.

As National Account Manager, Mr Magna is “Responsible for managing Retail, Dot Com, and Telco resellers” according to his profiles. He posted several five star reviews of Belkin products, all of which have been mysteriously scrubbed from Amazon’s website. It is known that after TDB published its original item Amazon has been purging the site of reviews it believes to be false, but it is unknown whether this deletion was done by the mega-etailer, or by the Belkin employees covering their tracks. Several of the screenshots shown here are screenshots of cached pages that were saved before they were removed.

Astroturfing reviews is one of the many widespread intra-company practices alleged by the Belkin whistleblower, who says that shady practices inside the company starts at the top. Even if these reviews were Mr Magna’s legit opinions of his products, it’s highly unethical to post reviews for your own company pretending that you’re just an average user. Mr Magna’s astroturfing under the name rudomag or R. Wood goes as far back as at least 2006.