UPDATE 5:05 p.m.: Carbonite’s chief executive responds below.

Last week, a clever citizen sleuth caught Belkin in the act of hiring people to post bogus five-star reviews for Belkin products on Amazon. And now, no sooner has the world stopped shaking its fist at Belkin than another smoking gun has emerged.

This one, kindly offered to Pogue’s Posts readers as an exclusive, is a tale of another company trying to game Amazon’s system. This time, the sleazy company is the online backup service Carbonite.

My reader, calling himself Bruce Goldensteinberg, signed up for Carbonite after hearing ads for it on the radio. The backing-up part went well, but when his computer actually crashed, he was unable to restore it from the online backup—and Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour.

Turns out Bruce Goldensteinberg is not a customer you want to disgruntle.

Frustrated, he started reading the reviews on Amazon. A few of them seemed suspicious. “They were created around the same date—October 31, 2006—all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,” Mr. Goldensteinberg writes on his blog. “You didn’t need to be Dick Tracy to see what was done. A few Google searches later, and it was clear.”

In short, “the review by Swami Kumaresan, rating Carbonite 5 stars, read too much like a testimonial,” he writes. “It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.”

It gets worse. Another review, posted the same day, was signed “by one Jonathan F. Freidin, of Marblehead, MA,” according to Mr. Goldensteinberg. “Jonathan wrote that Carbonite was a great way to easily back up data. And he should know, because he is a Senior Software Engineer there.”

(Mr. Goldensteinberg’s blog contains copious links and even screenshots that establish these guys’ connection to Carbonite.)

It doesn’t matter to me that Carbonite’s fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old. These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed, and I thank Bruce Goldensteinberg for helping me embarrass Carbonite’s sleazy practices as publicly as possible.

UPDATE: Shortly after my blog post was published, the phony reviews vanished from Amazon. I also received an e-mail note from Carbonite’s CEO, David Friend:

“These ‘reviews’ on Amazon from 2006 should have sourced the authors as Carbonite employees. I will personally see that the reviews are updated to disclose their employment affiliation. Had they been brought to my attention, they would have been removed long ago. We do have a policy about such things. I apologize to anyone who was mislead by these postings.”

That’s great that Carbonite is cleaning up its act—now, after it’s been caught. But Mr. Friend’s implication that he didn’t know about the phony Amazon reviews is a bit suspect. In fact, they WERE brought to Mr. Friend’s attention—in the comments for this Bits blog post from this past September. Mr. Friend himself replied. (His comment is #29.)