I received an email this morning from a @starwind.com email offering $600 to review their product on spiceworks, gartner, peerspot, trustradius and g2.
As far as I can tell this email is genuine as it passed SPF.
I don't recommend doing business with this vendor. This is the sort of dishonest behavior I expect from random unpronounceable name Amazon.com vendors, not a major provider in the VSAN business.
They did not appear to condition the payment on my posting a good review so this is probably legal, although I am not familiar with the regulations involved and uncertain. Either way I strongly disagree with this practice.
I attempted to contact starwind's abuse@ address to confirm the legitimacy of this email but as of 2022-12-12 have not had any response.
Hello Luna,
I see you have had some experience with StarWind Virtual SAN. With this in mind, I was wondering whether you would be interested in participating in a campaign we are currently holding:
We are looking for users who would leave their candid reviews about their experience with StarWind VSAN.
For participating you would receive $200 by PayPal for Gartner and for all other activities $100 by PayPal. In other words, if you participate in all five activities (SpiceWorks, Gartner, PeerSpot, G2, and TrustRadius) you can receive $600 by PayPal.
Once your review goes live and you receive the corresponding email from the respective platforms about it, send the link back to me and I will provide your chosen reward.
I am listing the links to relevant platforms, for which said activities campaign is held, below:
https://community.spiceworks.com/products/59914-starwind-virtual-san
https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/hyperconverged-infrastructure-software/vendor/starwind/product/starwind-virutal-san
https://www.peerspot.com/products/starwind-virtual-san-reviews
https://www.trustradius.com/products/starwind-virtual-san/reviews
https://www.g2.com/products/starwind-virtual-san/take_survey
Respectfully,Olga