Samsung has managed to land itself in a big soup. Already battling a slew of cases filed by Apple against it, Samsung has been caught apparently "paying for false praise and negative comments about competitors and has been fined just over $340,000".

Apparently, the issue came to light in April after Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into the allegations against Samsung. Investigations found that the allegations were true and that Samsung had used a "large number of hired writers and designated employees" to post negative comments about competitors in Taiwanese forums.

The FTC revealed that Samsung did this through a third party marketing company. Apart from Samsung, two local marketing firms were fined a combined total of over $100,000.

Though the FTC's report doesn't mention the targetted company, reports of HTC being Samsung's victim of the defamation campaign spread fast. The FTC, in its report said that the company, Samsung, paid people to "highlight the shortcomings of competing products".

In its report, FTC also said that Samsung had been involved in a number of infractions that included "disinfection of negative news about Samsung products", "palindromic Samsung product marketing", something which is known in the industry as "astroturfing".

Though not the only company to have been involved in such an activity, it has been caught red-handed twice this year alone

source: https://goo.gl/R3pP7d - India Today