The social commerce sites are at it again! Last Friday WeMakePrice sued Ticket Monster for defamation after the Wikipedia entry for WeMakePrice was altered several days prior to reflect negatively on the company. It was only last October when Korea’s most popular daily deals company Ticket Monster filed charges against leading competitor Coupang for illegal marketing via malicious software.
Added content on the page slandered the service, as well as the CEO of the company Heo Min. It appears that whoever altered the page wasn’t too familiar with Wikipedia’s systems, as lack of a name or ID when editing meant that the user’s IP address was recorded instead. The IP number was then tracked to Ticket Monster’s headquarters and the company has since admitted that it is likely that one of their employees added the not-so-flattering remarks to the page.
WeMadePrice’s Wikipedia page has since been changed back to its original state previous to the edits, but as with all entries on the site the edits were logged and can still be viewed here (Korean). In a press release sent to the media last Friday, Ticket Monster apologized for the incident, saying that it plans to further educate its staff so that similar behavior doesn’t happen in the future.
Nevertheless, Ticket Monster says that the content that was added could already be found on internet news sites and regrets that an employee simply listing such information has resulted in a criminal defamation investigation. WeMakePrice also commented, saying that it doesn’t want to believe that the defamation was carried out by Ticket Monster as a company and that as competition becomes fierce, hopes that healthier marketing methods will be used by companies in the future.
Earlier in January, Tmon, Coupang, WeMakePrice and Groupon all made headlines when it was revealed that all services had sold counterfeit products. The genuineness of products on social commerce sites has been debated for some time now with some describing it as counterfeit heaven. The companies were made to pay a total of 23 million won in penalties.
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