Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has fined Samsung $340,000 for tarnishing the reputation of rival Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC.
The FTC said Samsung had paid a Taiwanese company, called OpenTide, to write positive comments about Samsung products, along with degrading the products of rival HTC Corp. The chatroom where the comments were posted, is a popular place frequented by Internet users to gain information and advice about gadgets they are interested in purchasing.
Furthermore, it is understood that two local firms that took part in slandering HTC were also fined $100,000. The primary focus of Samsung's campaign was to degrade HTC products, however; other company products also got caught in the crossfire. In its defense, Samsung claims it had nothing to do with the fake comments and slanderous activity. The company laid all the blame on the firms it hired to manage its Internet marketing campaign.
Samsung said the "incident was unfortunate, and occurred due to insufficient understanding of these [the company's] fundamental principles."
In a related development, on October 23, Samsung apologized to Chinese consumers following a media report regarding hardware flaws in Samsung's Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 devices. Apparently, a firmware problem could cause memory chip damage, which could force the handsets to crash several times everyday.
"We welcome the scrutiny from the media. Due to problems with management that brought inconvenience to our customers, the company expresses its sincerest of apologies," read a message on Samsung's Chinese website.
This isn't the first time Samsung has been caught doing something dirty. In July, it was reported that the company had a code in its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone that speeds up the processor only when a benchmarking tool is being used. Earlier, in February, Beyond3D forums also reported that Samsung increased the speed of the Galaxy S4's 480 MHz GPU to 532 MHz whenever a benchmarking tool is in play.
