Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, has reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web, the New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday.

The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as independent sources.

One e-mail message, discovered by the attorney general’s office, told employees to “devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client.”

The company will pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the state. It has also agreed to stop publishing anonymous reviews on Web sites in the voices of satisfied customers and to identify any content created by employees, the statement said.

I wonder how widespread this method is. Creating fake buzz about your product by writing good reviews about it, fake tweets, comments on blogs, votes / likes in social media and so on. Just look at the sales letter sites all around internet that sell everything possible, they all have great testimonials from "real people"...

I bet that this case in only tip of the iceberg and as a consumer you must be very careful about not trusting what random people write online.

For companies, you might fake it for a while, you might get some money out of it, but by not creating really great products there will be no word of mouth (at least not positive) and the customer you cheated will make sure that they nor anyone in their social network comes back to you.