In an age where malicious actors can severely damage a company’s good name in seconds, Thrust Tech Accessories shares lessons learned
Imagine if you went to work one morning and found your facility surrounded by a dozen signs challenging your good name, the quality of your goods, and warning away future customers. Then imagine being told you cannot touch the signs without the express approval of the person who had put them up.
Now let’s say, next you get a call from someone claiming to be a “reputation strategist,” with just the right connections to get the signs removed – provided, of course, that you were willing to pay them upwards of $2,000.
At this point, you’re probably thinking this would never happen. It’s absurd. Truth is, something like this happens almost every day on the internet — where malicious actors can severely damage a company’s good name in seconds on websites like Indeed.com.
A case in point is Thrust Tech Accessories, a Ft. Lauderdale-based FAA/EASA Certified 145 Repair Station that recently found itself targeted by a couple negative comments — all of which sounded eerily alike.
In fact, when Nelson Echerri, TTA’s Quality Assurance Manager, ran a google search with the exact words used in one of the reviews, he found they cropped up over and over again.
- On Indeed: “Management detached at best. Equipment is old and broken all the time. Zero perks, no raises, no performance reviews…”
- On Glassdoor: “Management detached at best. Equipment is old and broken all the time. Zero perks, no raises, no performance reviews…”
Same words. Same review. In fact, the same lines were used for several other entirely different aviation companies: “Management detached at best. Equipment is old and broken all the time. Zero perks, no raises…”
If that wasn’t bad enough, Echerri also found that the reviews stretched back in time: first appearing in 2021 and continuing through 2022, confirming his suspicion that it was a scam, a copy and paste job.
I’ve never seen an owner invest as much in his people and equipment as company President Stanley Kowlessar has.”
As someone who very much enjoys working at TTA, Echerri took exception to the idea that the company wasn’t investing in its equipment or people. “I’ve been in operations for some 20 years,” he noted, “and I’ve never seen an owner invest as much in his people and equipment as our company president has.”
When Escherri appealed to Indeed for help, they told him the only person who could remove the review was the one who had posted it.
And that’s when Stanley Kowlessar, President and General Manager of TTA, began receiving strange emails; or as Nelson tells it: “Every time we get one of these negative reviews, Stanley soon thereafter gets an email from a company that says: hey, we noticed you have a bad review, we can help…”
The price? Two thousand dollars!
Which, of course, begs the question: what’s going on here? Is this an extortion racket? It’s almost impossible to say for sure.
Along with fake profiles and bots, there’s a whole industry of “Fake Review Brokers” who sell misleading reviews to goose the profits of their clients or smear their rivals. Amazon, for instance, recently filed suit against two such brokers who (the tech giant claims) have close to a million users willing to write fake reviews for them. To say it’s a costly problem is a bit of an understatement: in 2020 alone, Amazon spent over $700 million on the issue.
Online job-posting sites an be slow to respond to your complaints, so stay the course until you’re vindicated.
Echerri recommends an action plan that consists of the following:
- Step One: Don’t pay someone who says they can remove a fake review. Instead, appeal directly to the review site. And don’t bother with the automated lines. Just Google something like “Contact a human at [insert company name here].”
- Step Two: Present a coherent timeline of the fake reviews. Use multiple search engines and keywords to assemble your evidence. Things to look for: are the reviews overly negative? How often do they occur? (A spike over a short time usually indicates a targeted campaign.) Do keywords or phrases appear over and over? How’s the spelling and grammar? Are the comments riddled with errors? Even though sites like Indeed are slow to remove anything, if you make a compelling case, they can be swayed — at least in theory.
- Step Three: Patience and persistence. Such companies can be slow to respond to your complaints, so stay the course until you’re vindicated.
About Thrust Tech Accessories
Thrust Tech Accessories, based near South Florida’s Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport (FXE) supports multiple regional airlines across the U.S., along with overseas air carriers, and rotorcraft operators in numerous countries around the globe. It also supports corporate and private aircraft owners and operators. To find out more about TTA’s wide-ranging capabilities to support your aircraft or fleet and to obtain competitive program bids, contact us via email at TTAsales@TrustTech.com or call 954-984-0450.
