Edmunds Sues Marketing Firm For Creating Fake Car Dealer Reviews
Edmunds.com is suing a Texas-based Marketing firm called Humankind Design Ltd for creating up to 2,200 user accounts and posting up to 60 fake reviews of dealerships in the Los Angeles area.
Humankind operates a service called GlowingReviews.co which charges companies a monthly fee to post positive online reviews to websites such as Google+, Yelp, Cars.com and Edmunds.com. Edmunds has informed the other rating services of the suspected fraud.
There has been no response to the allegations from Humankind however Justin Anderson, who runs GlowingReviews.co described the allegations as groundless in an interview with Automotive News.
“I can say that we completely disagree with the assertion that we are posting fraudulent reviews online.”
According to Anderson, he collects handwritten notes from people and submits them online.
Edmunds.com has more than 20 million visitors per month to its website and lets them post reviews of cars and dealers. Each review is screened prior to posting and moderators started noticing a pattern in the reviews of the twelve dealerships in question which was attributable to a single source.
