Have you been contacted by someone from Reviewboard Magazine? Be careful with what you do next.
Our company was contacted by Philip Ferreira, the Special
Features Editor of Reviewboard Magazine in early August of 2015. He told us he
was interested in reviewing one of our products and potentially placing it on
the cover of the Reviewboard Magazine 2015 Holiday Buyer’s Guide. He said that
the magazine has been around for over 18 years, that they have over 1.5 million
subscribers and that their Holiday Buyer’s Guide is also available for purchase
on Amazon and on Google Play and iTunes. It turns out these are all lies.
There is no Reviewboard Magazine and they certainly don’t
have 1.5 million subscribers. None of their issues or Holiday Buyer’s Guides
have even been available on Amazon or anywhere else. We don’t even know if this
guy’s name is Philip Ferreira. Buyer beware!
If you or your company has been contacted by anyone from
Reviewboard Magazine do not bother with a response. Companies beware! This “Philip
Ferreira” will attempt to persuade you to send your product to them so they can
publish a review. There will never be a review because this is fraud.
I’ll admit it, we were fooled. At first glance, their
website looks like what an above-board publication would have. There are staff
pages, privacy policies, and they state they are owned by Random Publishing,
LLC. Their Facebook page has over 90,000 likes. After we were initially contacted,
we checked out their website and saw a review of one of our competitor’s
products.
Getting media coverage in any holiday shopping guide, let
alone a print publication with millions of readers, is a great opportunity for
any company. But we wish we were more diligent before falling for this scam.
Upon closer inspection the Reviewboard Magazine front begins to fall apart.
The reviews of products they have posted are thin. Each
review has only a single photo and maybe 100 words. Surely there should be more.
There appears to be a paywall where only subscribers can access the content.
There is nothing behind the paywall. The only way to pay for a subscription is
via PayPal to Philip Ferreira. Surely a publication as old and large as this
would have a more robust subscription shopping cart. Why would the Special
Features Editor and CFO have his personal name on the PayPal account? The
reviews available on their site look like they have been scraped from other
review sites. Some of the photos taken look like they used the same background,
so some of the reviews could be genuine.
Reviewboard Magazine claims to be owned by Random
Publishing, LLC. This may sound convincing, but only because it alludes to
Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the world. However, Penguin
Random House does not publish magazines – they are owned by a conglomerate that
also has a European magazine division. The only web presence Random Publishing,
LLC has is a LinkedIn profile that lists that they have 11-50 employees.
We sent Reviewboard Magazine our flagship product. They told
us everything was going fine, and that they were taking photos to use in their
publication. They even posted the cover of the Holiday Buyer’s Guide featuring
our product and one other on their website! We were so excited. Now came the time to
facilitate the return of our product. For some publications and industries it
is standard practice to send a product out for review and let them keep it.
This may certainly true for small items like video games, small gadgets, and
the like. This is certainly not true for products worth over $3,000.
We regularly send our expensive products out for review at
reputable publications. Big household names, and even some smaller industry
niche ones. Certainly the ones our customers frequent. We’ve never encountered
something like this before. The Reviewboard representative was not upfront
about this, even stringing us along telling us that he would return our product
soon. This week, he told us.
It was around this time that our customer support department
received a call about a user who was having trouble with our flagship product.
We don’t sell too many of those, and we could not locate the owner in our
warranty database. He told us he purchased the unit in eBay. We do not sell on eBay,
and we can’t imagine one of our customers reselling their item less than a year
after purchase, but this is not outside the realm of possibility. Little did we know that this was related to
our troubles with Reviewboard.
We found the completed listing for our product on eBay. It
was sold out of a pawn shop outside of Chicago, Fast Cash & Pawn USA in
Naperville, Il. The eBay username is (or was) fastcashogden630 and from the
photos they used in the listing you could see it was a pawn shop. What our flagship
product was doing in a pawn shop, we wondered. We also saw an eBay listing for the other expensive product that was featured on the mockup of
the cover of the holiday buyers guide next to our product.
We began to fervently search for any mention of Reviewboard
Magazine. We found a thread on Amazon Seller Forums that had similar complaints
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=2844865.
Other merchants and manufacturers have been approached by Reviewboard and asked
to send products. Those that did not received threats of poor reviews. Those
that did send their products never saw them, nor a review again. These products
were bunk beds and jewelry that cost hundreds and sometimes thousands of
dollars. In hind sight, it would have been better to have a poor review from
some inconsequential no-name fake review publication than to take a loss on our
product.
We also found some press releases from other manufacturers
that had apparently sent their items to Reviewboard Magazine. In each one the
boilerplate text describing the publication varies. In some, Reviewboard claims
to have 110 million readers in 54 countries, which is quite different from the
1.5 million we were told. In others the claim was that the Holiday Buyer’s
Guide was read by 28 million. None of these are true because neither the
Holiday Buyer’s Guide nor the Reviewboard Magazine is actually printed.
Other claims include that Alexa ranking lists Reviewboard
Magazine as the third largest consumer product review publication in the world.
In the emails we received this metric was listed as #10. However, anyone can
perform an Alexa rank check. At the time of this publication, we could see that
reviewboard.com is ranked 843,756th in the world, and falling. The website for Reviewboard Magazine is http://www.reviewboard.com/
If you have been contacted by anyone from Reviewboard
Magazine, the best thing to do is to ignore them. If you have been contacted by
their representatives, or have sent them product, we would love to hear your
story. Please email us at reviewboard.is.a.scam@gmail.com.
[UPDATE - June 2016] After this was published the 2015 Reviewboard Magazine Holiday Buyers Guide became available on Amazon. It was available to non-subscribers after Christmas. There is a review of our product there, and it is pretty good. In the past when we've had our product reviewed by organizations like CNET our product was returned to us. That is what we are concerned about. We've also heard from other businesses who have had similar experiences.
[UPDATE - June 2016] After this was published the 2015 Reviewboard Magazine Holiday Buyers Guide became available on Amazon. It was available to non-subscribers after Christmas. There is a review of our product there, and it is pretty good. In the past when we've had our product reviewed by organizations like CNET our product was returned to us. That is what we are concerned about. We've also heard from other businesses who have had similar experiences.
