PRETORIA – In the early hours of Tuesday, we received an inquiry from a business in Mooikloof, Pretoria that requested our assistance with an online service, which has been engaged in defamation of businesses locally.
According to the online review site, it was set up to help scam victims, Scam Baiter, or just someone who is fed up with phone scams, Scamwatcher.com provides the opportunity to publicly report phone fraud in order to help fight cybercrime.
Our team went on to investigate the site to get details of the owner of the website but there were none. We tried getting the details on ENOM but the details were all hidden with the service pointing to the hosting company under heritic in France.
Communication with the company heretic was not helpful, same as the online service called Scamwatcher, originally registered with heretic as Signal Arnaques in France. The company does little to be accessible or to give companies with bad reviews an opportunity to take corrective measures or reach out to the public.
It is worrying that such a company that makes it so easy for anyone to post unverified reviews existed in this age. Considering the many people that could have been affected by the site. We went on to the review section to see how many companies might have been affected and were unable to clear their record and name.
How are companies affected?
There were about 1234 scam reviews and 12 for some legitimate South African companies. We reached out to these companies and only a few responded but one that stood out was the frustration shared by the owner of CCL global, a management, sales, and human development company.
The company has been bullied, insulted, accused, and even threatened on the platform, and the initial review that started the ordeal was a mere assumption by an interviewee that created a negative trust index for the company online.
A defamation claim by the company is ongoing against Scamwatcher and google. The company has paid Scamwatcher to communicate with reviewers, pending the outcome of the court case but this has not changed the negative index of the company online.
We decided to speak to a few of the people who are listed on the CCL Global site and worked with the company to establish more details and information about CCL Global.
We interviewed their Branch managers who successfully completed the Management and Sales Program at CCL Global. Most of them mentioned the program came with hurdles but most were convincing, about the role of an apparent manager called Kobus, who they said has been exceptional in their development in the company.
What is the Catch
Scamwatcher.com charges huge fees for companies willing to respond but do not offer assistance with correcting or contacting the reviewer. The company also runs the business in the hope that the desperation would force companies to pay monthly, while they benefit from the bad reviews.
This is similar to what most hackers did in the 90s when they created an online craze or expose the private data of users, to drive traffic to a site, while they enrich themselves through the advert by the numbers.
According to Zweli Mandla an associate of the Gauteng Chamber of Commerce, defamation has become a serious problem in South Africa, as everyone uses google to verify businesses. This in turn requires the South African government to implement legislations that protect businesses from bullying and online exploitation through reviews.
CCL Global like many companies is waiting for the hope that something can be done to correct the activities of these types of online systems that have become a nightmare for businesses in the world.
Facebook Comments