Summary
This post is old and things have evolved since then.
A while back I accidentally discovered a strange trend in positive WAE+ reviews online, i.e. that they were written by obvious shill accounts being recycled across a few different companies. As a result of the original post (below), Zahed Kamal, a freelancer employed to post such reviews, accidentally revealed himself to me (see comments). The Guardian newspaper picked up on all of this too, and they have more investigation/insight:
Guardian Money tracked down fake reviews promoting WAE+ (formerly known as We Are Electricals), which last year was the most complained about company to our consumer champions’ Bachelor&Brignall consumer champions column.
[...]When Guardian Money contacted Kamal, he told us he was contracted to post reviews about WAE+ and was paid for his services. It is understood he was contacted through Freelancer.com by someone under the name of “f0rtkn0x”. This is believed to be Ben Slater, operations director of WAE+.
Fake reviews plague consumer websites – Guardian.co.uk
Other Useful resources if you’re interested in WAE+:
- Guardian.co.uk – Concern grows over electricals website
- MoneySavingExpert.com forum thread
- WAE+ apparently submitted a Cease and Desist notice against Google
- Feefo – universally wonderful recent WAE+ reviews
- Review Centre – universally terrible recent WAE+ reviews
- TrustPilot – completely mixed reviews
- Recent opinions via Twitter, currently unfavourable
- Reseller ratings reviews – 0.01/10, 380 reviews. Ouch!
A friendly reminder that posting reviews of fake experiences, from which you expect to personally gain, is illegal under the Fraud Act 2006.
Original text follows.
As their rebranded WeAreElectricals+ (WAE+, WAEplus, waeplus.co.uk) came up in a Google shopping search for me with relatively good reviews(!), I had to investigate. As a little back-story, I had a job interview there once upon a time and felt they were unprofessional to say the least, and was amused a few months later to see their name come up in the Guardian regarding borderline illegal practices (i.e. taking people’s money, not giving them anything in return and refusing to give refunds – it turned out to be a pretty lucky escape that I didn’t end up with their name on my CV as this all blew up afterwards).
And indeed, upon a cursory inspection, the reviews do not stand up to scrutiny.
The vast majority of recent 5 star reviews are written by accounts who have also reviewed a few other companies. If you look through them, you find that they have all reviewed the same companies!
What I’ve done is I’ve looked at the latest 5 star reviews on ReviewCentre.com and TrustPilot.co.uk and aggregated them into the following table. The table shows for each reviewer what other companies they have reviewed. Any company that comes up twice in the set is included in the table. From this you can see a very, very suspicious similarity across all the most recent five star reviewers. I’ve also included the total number of reviews they have made.
UserMH TrendsPhix ClothingPlus500Loveclothing% (total)*
| Mitch | X | 100% (2) | |||
| sueTHEbest | X | 100% (2) | |||
| JstSamira | X | 100% (2) | |||
| BENlitchers | X | X | 75% (4) | ||
| Carly Rudding | X | 100% (2) | |||
| Liam Ridgewell | X | 100% (2) | |||
| harrygoodwille | X | X | X | 100% (4) | |
| Reeves | X | X | 75% (4) | ||
| L. Roswell | X | 66% (3) | |||
| jared | X | 100% (2) | |||
| Jack Drinkwater | X | X | 100% (3) | ||
| Sally Kingston | X | X | X | 100% (4) |
* The percentage of reviews accounted for by the reviews in this table (and WAE+). i.e. consider a user who has reviewed four companies. One is WAE+, let’s say two appear in this table, then this column would be 75% (4). The purpose of this is to show that I am not taking people with thousands of reviews, finding a tiny intersection and claiming it’s significant.
Conclusion
Apparently, most people who thought WAE+, a company based in Birmingham UK with prices in pounds sterling, has good customer service also bought from M.H Trends, which is odd because M.H Trends is an American clothes shop with prices in dollars. This seems very unlikely. Clearly, these reviewers are not real people, but are instead shill accounts. From the fact they seem to be focussing on a small set of companies, the chances are that WAE+ are not posting these reviews; instead they are outsourcing it to some other company. The other company is employed by a few different companies (including WAE+, MH Trends, Phix Clothing, etc) and is recycling their accounts so they don’t have to re-register quite so much. I would further hypothesise that WAE would have tried to handle this internally before outsourcing it, so a number of positive reviews from before these are probably also fake.
lol! i think you are his competitor!!
DING DING DING, we have a winner!
Readers won’t get the benefit of this, but on my WordPress Dashboard, I see today I’ve had a referral from “freelancer.com/users/messages/”, and the email address rather cunningly entered for the parent comment is “zahedkamal87@yahoo.com”, and was written by a Bangladeshi IP address. A quick Google search reveals: http://www.freelancer.com/u/zahedkamal87.html, where Zahed offers his services:
1. “Rating/Review Writing and Posting” for Business/Company/Website in sites like – [...] Trustpilot, ReviewCentre [...] “.
Would you like to comment, Zahed? Could you confirm or deny that WAE+ are paying you to write fake reviews? Or is this just some massive coincidence?
Also thanks for writing under your real email address. I’m pleased to see your computer science degree is going to good use.
So Zahed mysteriously vanished, but as a follow up to this, if you now look at Zahed’s profile linked in my other comment, you’ll see there’s a review from someone called f0rtkn0x (http://www.freelancer.com/u/f0rtkn0x.html).
Intriguingly, the first google hit for ‘f0rtkn0x’ is a site called LondonWired, which is owned by ‘MarshMedia’ (http://whois.domaintools.com/londonwired.co.uk). Marsh Media, http://www.marshmedia.info, apparently resides at 180 Newhall Street Birmingham. The same address as WAE+!
We’ve also got someone called ‘f0rtkn0x’ posting at http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=120452 introducing himself as ‘Ben from MarshMedia’.
Oh, and there’s http://soundcloud.com/ben-slater-4, whose username/tagline/something is f0rtkn0x. Note the address is Ben Slater. Note that somebody called Ben Slater is a director of WAE+. (http://company-director-check.co.uk/director/913276006).
Nothing suspicious here… perfectly reputable organisation going about its legitimate business of employing Bangladeshis to write fake reviews for its services.
f0rtkn0x has now removed the reference from his freelancer.com page. But the review is still on Zahed’s.
This is possibly the most incompetent cover up I’ve ever seen.
A little more googling reveals that f0rtkn0x himself has written a WAE+ review! http://www.resellerratings.com/user/f0rtkn0x
And someone called f0rtkn0x seems to be interested in pirated accountancy software (http://www.uniquewarez.com/applications/62502-sage_50_payroll_professional_2009_15_00_018_a.html)
Oh crap. I wish I’d actually done some research before buying from them.
I’ve only spent £30, but still…
Thanks for all the useful info on WAE+. Just been caught myself.
First time I’ve used WAE+ and first time I’ve had any problem with buying over the internet.
Ordered a camera on Sat 28 July. My bank was debited on 30 July so I assumed goods had been despatched. However, order progress shows estimated delivery of 13-15 August. This looks strange. Other goods I ordered on free delivery from other suppliers on 28 July all arrived by 8 August.
Quick check of WAE+ reviews online show that cash up front followed by delayed delivery & delayed refunds are commonplace. A lot of very bad reviews & some very suspect (in my opinion) glowing reviews. Birmingham Trading Standards are aware (see BTS website).I have cancelled my order and am not surprised to find that refunds take a lot longer than when they take the cash. Nothing so far other than that ‘it’s being dealt with’. I have given details to Birmingham Trading Standards, via the Citizen Advice Consumer Helpline 08454 040506 & advised my bank & local police of same.
Wish I’d done my research on them first !
There’s a guardian article about this. Lets hope they can do some more digging. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/nov/16/we-are-electrical-plus-complaints-new-website?commentpage=last#end-of-comments
Thanks for that. It’s brilliant they close with “There are many positive reviews on the internet for WAE+”!
As the article notes, the Guardian had complaints and published an article about We Are Electricals (not technically WAE+, but the same directors, the same office and most likely the same employees) last year. It’s sad that a year on, they still exist and appear to be trading in exactly the same way.