Aircon biz fined $1.3m after boss set up attack websites slamming critical punters No one likes getting negative reviews online, and it's no secret that many business owners try to fudge the system by posting positive reviews of themselves under pseudonyms. But Mechanic's Heating and Air Conditioning – based in Marietta just outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the US – has taken it to a whole new level. The …
I'm amazed how he can put so much effort into harassing his customers but not put the effort into doing a better job in the first place.
No doubt this kind of behaviour has a name[1] - perhaps someone can enlighten me?
[1] A real 'psychology' name, not 'twat', thank-you very much. ;-)
Sometimes I wished I hadn't but I did. (Have the the piece of paper from a Russell Group and all that). Now plying my trade in online reputation management and related areas so doubly qualified (or not) to comment. Based on the available information I'm afraid 'Twat' seems to fit the behaviour very well and I can't better it.
It really is easier to just do a good job than repair a damaged reputation. If he'd have applied his skills with pride he could probably have managed the former and avoided the need for the latter where his skillset is obviously challenged.
No doubt this kind of behaviour has a name - perhaps someone can enlighten me?
"Malignant Narcissism". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malignant_Narcissism )
He's a small-scale version of Levi Bellfield, if you follow the annals of crime in the UK.
(Don't fret about not having studied psychology; there's nothing wrong with having decided to be a mathematician.)
One reason for the delay (beyond probable political connections) is that the general interpersonal climate of Georgia, esp. Atlanta, tends toward the cruel and retributive, so while the behaviors might seem outrageous to outsiders, they weren't that far beyond the norm there. Even in other locations, I can sometimes pick out people from that area.
Really, how hard is it to just write fake positive reviews, instead of attacking the negative ones?
It can't be very difficult, as evidenced by the high proportion of obviously fake reviews on Yelp.
My real question is how many of the reviews on Yelp are carefully written fakes. Surely not all of the people writing fake reviews are incompetent. You can even cheat on the fake -- take a credible positive review from another city and tweak it for your own business.
In my student days I wrote a few fake reviews when managing front of house for a restaurant. It is actually tricky to keep coming up with convincing reviews. Copying and pasting from other places is likely to get you caught. I believe most of the review sites employ similar software to that used by universities to detect plagiarism.
To be honest the whole online review system is flawed. One bad review has about as much impact as ten good ones. Unfortunately most people only write reviews if they feel they had a bad experience. From what I've seen a bad experience can be something as minor as not liking the background music, or ordering a dish that was spicier than they expected, or not stocking the 'right' ales. When a minor quibble on the internet can significantly cut into trade it's no surprise that fake positive reviews are so common.
For movies, games, tv shows, smartphones, GPUs, cars.. anything.
And multinational companies/corporations do most of the dirty job. Or they hire scam agencies operating in India, East Europe, South America, North Africa that have hundreds or thousands of "employees" doing the dirty job 24/7.
So they create fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and so on.. they post fake comments on blogs, forums .. to either promote or attack depending on who is paying them for what.
So a competitor can bash upcoming products either being smartphones or movies.
And when a product is really bad these scam agencies get a lot of money to promote it because the multinational companies marketeers tell that the only way to sell a really bad product is thru brainwashing people.
The real gravy, the real profit is getting much more money than what the services supplied are worth. Which is best done by getting people to pay for one thing and delivering much less.
And to keep that easy profit rolling in it is well worth it to spend a little of that sweet easy profit addressing any impediments to it's flow. This HVAC biz shows how successful such tactics are, they have been making very good money for a very long time. It is capitalism.
Well, it is modern capitalism which has learned there is more profit in rigging the system, corrupting the system, than actually trying to compete fairly or supply reasonable and fair services. Competing fairly is expensive and the only goal profit so expenses are best be kept down. Morals have no role in business, laws maybe but even then only those enforced to the point it impacts profits.
This little company is just doing what large companies and global industries are doing, making profit, capitalism in the 21st century.
If this HVAC company was big enough there would be no reporting of their actions, in fact they might have had enough profit to buy a change to legislation that would make their actions legal or at least ensure their actions would receive little or no attention.
As it is a larger company is quite happy we are talking about the practices of such a small company, but hey maybe that is just a coincidence.
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