For IT veterans, this latest example of vendor perfidy simply reinforces the value of the adage "let the buyer beware."

"I've been in IT for over 20 years and if I believed every sales pitch that I've been given about the capabilities of hardware and software we would not be e-mailing each other [about this incident] right now," writes Anthony Rodrigues, director of information technology, City of Malden, Mass., responding to an e-mail query. "There's a huge difference between theory and real world operations."

He doesn't search out product reviews. On those rare occasions when he reads one, he only does so to glean an "impression" of the product, to be confirmed by far more in-depth study and conversation with the vendor.

The scam by the Belkin employee was discovered and then by political blogger Arlen Parsa on his Dailybackground.com Web site late Friday Jan. 16. 

Parsa had been earning some money doing computer task-work on Amazon's site. In the course of that, he found another task advertised: creating completely fictitious positive reviews of Belkin products on one or more Web sites, and then marking negative reviews of the same product as "unhelpful" to delegitimize them. Each review would be worth 65 cents to the "writer."