Tracing Victor’s footsteps I looked at a few different CDs on amazon.com and found essentially the same Customer Review, using different aliases of course, for Yanni’s album Ethnicity and Live At the Acropolis and Higher Octave’s compilations Barcelona Nights: The Best of Ottmar Liebert 1. All of these reviews were written in July and all of them seem to have the title Thanks For The Introduction To Mehdi.
So I searched Google for that exact phrase by putting it in quotation marks and discovered this. The phrase was used onethousandfivehundredandseventy (1,570) times!!
Shocking isn’t it!!
I have ordered CDs and DVDs from amazon.com because I read informative customer reviews. I think amazon.com needs to add a field called Suspected Spam immediately, before they lose credibility and as a result sales. If you know somebody at amazon.com, you might want to point that out to them.
And to all of the artists and record labels using computer jockeys to create this sort of spam: Karma is a mother……..!
PS: Using amazon’s own A9 search
That is unreal. That many?? Unbelievable. Time for the world to know of that. You’d think with the care that seems to go into checking your password, etc.at Amazon that would happen very seldom. Did you send this message to Amazon?
This one is so obviously phoney since the guy wrote it before he even heard your album.
I did get mine today. That’s pretty fast.
“Karma is a mother……..!” Is that the same as “Payback is a b!+@% ?”
Wow…that’s something Amazon really needs to work on, this kind of thing can’t be allowed to slip. And I’d like to give this Mehdi fellow the benefit of the doubt, but why would a subpar musician have such an agressive, spamming fan? lol and I liked how he called you “the Ottmar Liebert Band”…well disguised spam :)
Hey, maybe we could do this for OL’s music…:P
Nice work – looks like I only touched the tip of the iceberg! I think what the Google results show are sites that all display reviews from Amazon. Apparently since the review engine is web based some spammer figure out a way to automate entries into it. In fact this has been going on for at least a couple years because I found an entry from Oct. 2002 with the same title and text! What’s kind of funny is that it was for a Christmas album from “Jive Bunny” – whatever the heck that is! My point being that they didn’t even selectively target just “New Age” musicians – making their spam even more blatantly obvious!
Well, I don’t know anybody at Amazon but I sent a message through their “suggestion box” anyway. I asked them to both clean out the “reviews” in question and also not support artists who employ such tactics. I thought about writing to customer support at SoothingMusic.com, but, since it’s either them or their boy Mehdi who’s employing the spammers, I figured that’s just a piss into the wind at best.
No luck finding Mehdi himself either. Turns out that “Mehdi” is from Islamic theology meaning “divinely guided one”. (Ouch – don’t make me laugh so hard!!!)
Hi OL,
Yes! What goes around comes around…homeostasis is a real entity, and while one doesn’t always get to see the result or reaction to another’s dishonesty, there is solace in the realization that there is balance in the universe that we live in.
Even so, I would somehow contact this Mehdi fellow and Amazon.com and have a discussion…Leadership by example is the surest road for positive change.