Samsung has denied recent reports suggesting that it hired Samsung "fanboys" to attend a Chinese press event used to announce new Samsung products.
The reports said that Samsung paid between 400 and 500 Samsung fans between 30 and 50 yuan, or $5 to $8 dollars, to attend the event.
"Samsung investigated a media report on April 3 that claimed people were temporarily hired and paid to attend the Galaxy S6 launching event in Shanghai, China and later found that the story was totally groundless and bogus," said Samsung in a statement. "The news article contended that part-timers, acting as 'fanboys' of Samsung smartphones, participated in the launching event. However, our findings have indicated that under no circumstances has anyone been hired or given money to attend the event."
Despite Samsung denying the reports, a person saying that they specialize in recruiting fans said he brought over 100 people to the press event. He also said that fans paid to be there amounted to over half of those attending the event. Not only that, but he was specifically asked by Samsung to hire people in their early 20s, presumably to make Samsung seem more trendy.
This is not the first time that Samsung has been accused of paying for people to be fans of its brand in order to drum up hype. In 2013, Samsung was fined for hiring people to post negative comments online about HTC smartphones. The company then went on to blame an external agency for the issue. In another case, an agency working with Samsung was blamed for hiring developers to promote Samsung on a developer website called Stack Overflow.
Samsung has had a pretty rough year, and perhaps this is why the company is trying to drum up more hype and interest about its products. Samsung has lost a lot of market share to the likes of Xiaomi in most countries in Asia, where Samsung has most of its presence. On a global level, Samsung's market share dropped from 24.6 percent to 20 percent in 2014. This proves that what were once smaller smartphone companies are now heavily eating into Samsung's dominance in the smartphone market.
Not only that, but Samsung is losing market share in other areas of the world, too. The iPhone became the most popular smartphone in the U.S. during the last quarter of 2014. However, it is largely expected that Samsung will regain that crown during other quarters.
