Beware Of Fake Reviews Posted By Competitors ! (copy)

Many in Data Recovery will be aware of the problems faced from the "Marketing Gurus"  "e-warfare experts" and self proclaimed "leading forensic experts" in the field of data recovery.

However you will need to have been in the direct firing line of these rogues for many years  to understand just how they operate and why I for one saw the need to fight back online...

During the last three years my company abc Data Recovery Ltd has been in a Turf War in the UK market with "Fields Associates brands" : and recently Fields were  "mulcted in costs" by the small claims courts.

With so many brands and claims of many tens of thousands of successful recoveries, surely there should be a handful of genuine reviews and the FieldsGroup would not have to stoop to posting fake reviews ?

DataPhoenix
Rapid Recovery
Rapid Data
Rapid Data Recovery
Fields Data Recovery
Fields Associates
Fields Group.

But is the online marketing battle fair ? with so many questionable review sites put out in favour of Fields Data Recovery Rapid Data Recovery and their associates how can small companies compete with a self proclaimed operation whose mantra is "unrelenting growth through sector domination"

The DRC Directory is one way to fight back against sites like:-

www.comparedatarecovery.co.uk  www.data-recovery-companies.co.uk (this is UK Digital Solutions Ltd part of Fields Group) and many more :-

www.best-pick-data-recovery.com	www.data-recovery-europe-blog.com
www.clever-datarecovery-europe.com	www.best-data-recovery.co.uk
www.data-recovery-europe-review.com	www.best-data-recovery-uk.com
www.which-datarecovery-europe.com	www.compare-datarecovery-europe.com
www.uk-data-recovery-feedback.com	www.best-choice-data-recovery-europe.com
www.clever-data-recovery-uk.com	www.first-class-data-recovery-uk.com
www.SMART-DATA-RECOVERY-UK.COM	www.smart-datarecovery-europe.com

The cost of marketing is not an insignificant part of overheads and impacts the cost effective pricing of a data recovery service,  to see profits them wasted because you are competing against a papermill and not a genuine competitor does make you think carefully how best to approach the problem of dealing with a "non competitor"

ABC Data Recovery Ltd does provide data recovery services under contract to many of the UK's leading data recovery resellers, IT Support companies and direct to over 5000 consumers annually but refuses to offer a no data no fee / free assessment on any drives opened by Fields / Rapid.

Fields Data Recovery claimed  to have 1000 resellers and over 60,000 enquiries in 2009 and completed 3000 recoveries, which to me is an incredibly low conversion rate and knowing the cost of those enquiries could have cost double because of the way they market, it has to be wondered how they can make any money from the recoveries at their claimed pricing and unsubstantiated claim to offer a 90 day money back guarantee and lowest costs in the UK .

Well as we all know, that is not how they make their profits, they are made from selling parts never used, and supplying fake reports or walking the price to up to 10 times what a reputable company would charge.

Our capacity, success rates and reputation has been earned through hard work and committment to high standards, but Fields use their marketing machine and ability to spool articles and fake testimonials all backed by ISO9001 accreditation to delude a potential client.

Fields don't have the best paid salespeople in the industry for nothing, the only problem is they seem only too happy to malign competitors, and when we fight back they get upset and threaten legal action, issue cease and desist letters and even fire out High Court Injunctions against anyone they cannot "buy off"


Unfortunately there is sometimes a  downside to success, we all get enquiries from those who have sufferred failure with other data recovery companies and we do have clients whom we have not been able to help or who have  felt dissatified with our services.

Mostly these are drives which are beyond recovery, problems with couriers,  others are because donor parts are not in stock or readily available.

We do our best to help everyone in their hour of need but of course there is a cost to supplying our services and it is not helped having to compete in the sponsored listings against an operation designed to extract money from the client in any way they can.

Afterall if you have a policy to  get 3 quotes from the top 3 listings how would you know they are the same company?



However when you see on a regular basis drives that have been abused to the point that you have to question the competitors "Head of Data Recovery" if he has a problem, it is of course a professional courtesy to not just go online and "Bash a competitor" .

I did just that, I had a chat with Fields Head of Data Recovery Alyn Jones, he seemed to want to have a mutually friendly chat and was of course defensive. 

The question asked was "why there would be fingerprints and airborn dust on one drive returned by Fields"  this was explained as "possibly the customer opened it"  but after several such instances and fake reports showing incorrect donor parts used or duplicate reports for differrent drives, it was clear something was amiss.

When I asked about their clean room certification and mentioned their sales staff were claiming I did not have a clean room he said they had an ISO-3 certified clean room. 

Subsequent to this all sorts of negative comments and reviews started to appear online about my company, and posts on various forums in my name and in my company name.

Was this a coincidence ? 

3 years later nothing has changed:  today  I spotted another negative comment about our data recovery software R3Cover,  which has been selling successfully worldwide for over a year, and although  response to our requests for independant reviews is very low even compared to the 5% take up of reviews of our data recovery services, they are still positive.

So when a negative review shows up it needs investigating:-

Here is one fake comment on a review site , quickly followed by an endorsement of the fake review, I am sure the website administrator will investigate.

My comment : The version 4.5.0.0 is listed with Apple and passed Apple testing and has proven very successful, the new version 5.0 will be released soon ! The window version 4.5.0.1 has passed Windows 7 validation.  No need to rush to fix something that is not broken, but we are always looking to improve. Unlike Angel 2.7 and Rapid Data 2.7 ---  

 Also beware of more Fields  / Rapid Data fake review sites: