Samsung's forum astroturfing - not limited to Sweden?

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Recently, there has been a lot of online coverage about an Swedish advertising agency promoting various Samsung products in internet forums without disclosure.

When Adland questioned Samsung about the matter, a representative said: "What the Viral Company [the agency] are doing is new to us, and going too far. We can see that this has been criticized. We have put a stop this this.

"We will reevaluate our internal policy over this and analyse our relationship with the Viral Company before we continue with any new campaigns."

But, is the problem limited to one rogue agency in Sweden? Some interesting posts on Computeractive's own online forum suggest otherwise. Take a look at this post, for example.

The user who started the thread wanted to share a video showing the "12 Mega Pixel quality that creates a clear and fine video" of a Samsung camera - which is fair enough, perhaps. But then check his previous posts: here, here and here. It's fair to say that he's very interested in Samsung products and nothing else.

The user account in the posts has accessed our site from two IP addresses, both located in Seoul, South Korea.

Neither IP is directly associated with Samsung. However, we ran the two IPs through Google and found, via Google's cache, that it has been used to post on many Korean forums. Again, the posts contain links to Youtube videos about Samsung products (examples here, here).

We welcome companies that wish to communicate directly with our forum users, but ask that they do so openly after disclosing their association with products they wish to discuss. And, although these posts do not appear to have come from Samsung itself, it seems odd that one user in Korea is interested enough in the company's products to post about them, and nothing else, on an English-language messageboard.

We contacted Samsung on the February 8 (before the Swedish story broke) and asked whether the company employs people in Korea to post about its products in internet forums. The company has yet to comment, but we will publish an update if it does.