Posted on Friday, October 25 2013 @ 14:10 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Verge
reports Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) fined Samsung for just over $340,000 for a smear campaign against competitor HTC. According to the report, Samsung hired a large number of writers and designated employees to post negative comments about HTC in Taiwanese forums.
The commission does add that the company did this through a third-party marketing company, just as Samsung originally claimed. Two local marketing firms were fined a combined total of over $100,000 for their part in the marketing ploy.
When news first broke of Samsung's behavior, HTC was presented as the victim of a campaign of defamation from the Korean company's army of commenters, but the FTC's report into the matter doesn't mention the Taiwanese company by name. Instead, it only notes that the company paid people to "highlight the shortcomings of competing products." The commission did dig up a lot more nefarious activity related to Samsung's commenters, though. The list of infractions includes the "disinfection of negative news about Samsung products," "palindromic Samsung product marketing," and the positive evaluation of Samsung products.
