Hero Renewables Fake Reviews
5th March 2019
UPDATE October 2019
Since I published my reviews about Hero Renewables, I've been contacted 3 times by both directors Martin Murphy and Jill Oldham to discuss the issues I had. They have both admitted that friends and family have left positive reviews, and thay have defended this by claiming that it is normal to show support in this way and that they are unable to stop it from happenning.
As usual neither of these statements is true: it is a clear conflict of interest, blatently immoral, and a clear misrepresentation to claim a positive experience of a company when you've never in fact used their service. Even if friends and family leave positive reviews of their own accord, Hero Renewables have the option to ask them to remove the reviews so as to not to damage their reputation. Also several of the reviewers were employees who they can certainly demand remove their reviews.
Also, almost immediately after I left a review on Facebook, Hero Renewables disabled their whole Facebook page. A couple of months later it resurfaced but with the review section disabled, so unfortunately the reviews that I mention below can no longer be publicly viewed. It says a lot about a company that hides its reviews!
I made the mistake of not looking at reviews before I placed my order with Hero Renewables. On Facebook many of the reviews are negative and many of them show the same sort of issues that I faced, e.g. poor communication, not responding to communications, untrustworthyness, breaking promises, being blamed for errors. Several comments specifically mention poor customer service from Jill Oldham. Some quotes from other reviews and comments which reflect these issues are:
- "6 months down the line we still hear nothing until we contact you, and every time you say...we'll be back in touch tomorrow...and what do we hear? You've guessed it. Nothing."
- "We haven't heard from her [Jill Oldham] despite her assurances to deal with the situation"
- "Absolutely awful! Unprofessional, untrustworthy, incompetent, trerrible lack of communication"
- "The customer service we have received from Jill Oldham has been terrible."
- "Unreliable, not to be trusted. Zero communication, zero customer service, zero care"
- "Very poor communication...Despite multiple promises I get no information"
- "Both a Director and the real owner...shout at me and blame me for the plethora of errors and communication cock ups"
- "No communication (except asking for money) misled by the sales staff in order to secure a sale"
- "They have deliberately withheld material information which could render the contract unenforceable"
There are also several positive reviews on Facebook, but almost all of them are fake as they're written by either employees of Hero Renewables, or people who appear to be within a friendship group with Martin Murphy, one of the company directors. Below is a screenshot of their reviews page, with the fake ones highlighted with a red box
We don't need to dig too deep to find these, one person has already commented that Martyn Perks is an employee. This can easily be verified by clicking on his profile where his job is given as "Senior Technical Executive at Hero Renewables". If we look at his friends list we can see one of them is Martin Murphy, so there's no doubt that this is fake.
Likewise, if we visit the profile of Jade Hodder-Unwin, it lists Hero Renewables as a previous employer, and she is also friends with Martin Murphy. This is definitely fake.
Next we have the trio of Gaz McGarvie, Kadour Ben Azouz and George Greaves. These are a little harder to identfy as fake because none of them list their employer, and Gaz and Kadour don't list their friends. However George does and we can see that not only is he friends with Martin Murphy, but he's friends with both Gaz and Kadour, so they clearly all know each other. If you need more evidence, all three reviews were all left on 12th February 2018 within 21 minutes of each other, at 11:18, 11:21 and 11:39 respectively. These are definitely fake.
Finally we have Samantha JoJo Collins. Her profile doesn't say she works at Hero Renewables, but she is friends with Martin Murphy, and what's more they appear together in many photos. It looks very much like the girlfriend of one of the directors has left a positive, but undoubtedly fake review.
For balance I will note that there are 2 more recent positive reviews that I can't find any evidence of being fake.
The reviews on Google are mixed, but we can immediately see Kadour Ben Azouz who also left a fake Facebook review. There's also Aaron Amery Oldham and Ryan Murphy who left reviews around the same time and interestingly have the same surnames as the two directors, Jill Oldham and Martin Murphy, is this just a co-incidence?
Of course not. In phone calls with Jill Oldham since leaving my reviews she admitted that Aaron Amery Oldham is her son, and he has in fact left 2 five star reviews. She has defended him leaving reviews claiming that "it's normal to support your mother's business". It is not normal to leave fake reviews, and if Hero Renewables had a grain of integrity she would have asked her son to remove them. Months after I spoke to her these reviews are still present on Google. I can't find any definitive evidence that Ryan Murphy is related, although there is a Ryan Murphy who is Facebook friends with Martin Murphy.
YouGen
Next let's look at the YouGen site, which is supposedly a "trusted, award winning and independent advice service". Hero Renewables have a profile and it has 33 reviews. Every single one of those is overwhelmingly positive. In several comments to posts on their Facebook page they have linked to their YouGen profile to give examples of positive reviews. Lets dig a little deeper.
To start with it's odd that 100% of the reviews for any company are positive. Even great companies have off days and things do go wrong, and people tend to shout about their experience more when it's bad. But given my experience and the largely negative reviews on Facebook, plus the fact that 75% of the positive reviews on Facebook are definitely fake, it's difficult to believe that all of these YouGen reviews are real.
Unlike Facebook you can't find much information about who left the reviews, so all I have to go on is the review itself, the username and the date it was left. Let's list them all and see what we see:
| Anonymous35 | 09-05-2018 |
| Anonymous_Reviewer | 09-05-2018 |
| Anonymous32 | 11-12-2017 |
| David Nelson | 11-12-2017 |
| Anonymous31 | 11-12-2017 |
| Robert Millican | 13-11-2017 |
| Bill Whitehead | 10-11-2017 |
| Martin Graebe | 10-11-2017 |
| Len Williamson | 10-11-2017 |
| Anonymous29 | 10-11-2017 |
| Anonymous28 | 10-11-2017 |
| Peter Simkins | 30-10-2017 |
| John Sterry | 26-10-2017 |
| John White. | 24-10-2017 |
| Andrew Riley. | 16-10-2017 |
| Anonymous Reviewer | 13-10-2017 |
| Benjamin James Brampton | 12-10-2017 |
| Tom Grundey | 12-10-2017 |
| Nancy Clarke | 12-10-2017 |
| Paul McClennon | 11-10-2017 |
| Ian Mackenzie | 11-10-2017 |
| Ian Thompson | 11-10-2017 |
| Thomas Wason Boyd | 11-10-2017 |
| David Stubbs | 11-10-2017 |
| Nabonita Robins | 11-10-2017 |
| Stephen Currah | 11-10-2017 |
| Ali Dygnas. | 11-10-2017 |
| Anonymous27 | 10-10-2017 |
| Ali Dygnas | 04-10-2016 |
| Derwenlas | 26-09-2016 |
| springers111 | 12-09-2016 |
| Tom G | 09-06-2016 |
| Freddy | 06-11-2015 |
There's a few interesting things to note here:
- Out of 33 reviews, 26 were left in just 2 months between 10th October and 11th December 2017.
- 14 of those were during the 7 days from 10th to 26th October 2017.
- 8 of them were on the same day, 11th October 2017.
- Another 5 were on same day, 10th November 2017.
- 6 of the reviews are from the users "Anonymous27", "Anonymous28", "Anonymous29", "Anonymous31", "Anonymous32", "Anonymous35", all in that order. 28 and 29 were on the same day as each other, and 31 and 32 were also on the same day as each other.
- The users "Andrew Riley." and "John White." look suspicious, they both have a dot at the end of their user name, they left reviews just 1 week apart, and both used the exact phrase "living up to expectations so far" in their actual reviews.
- Ali Dygnas features twice under 2 usernames, one with the familiar dot at the end of the username, but interestingly nearly a year apart. Alison Dygnas is one of the possibly real positive reviewers on Facebook.
To me this looks suspicious. How did 8 people submit a review during the same day? And another 5 people on another day? Why are several reviews submitted through sequentially numbered "anonymous" accounts? Genuine reviews will be submitted by random people at random times and these people will, generally, not be working together or have knowledge of each other. It's exceptionally unlikely that so many would leave a review on the same day, or during the same short period. Given the first review was nearly 3 years before the last, it's very odd that more than 75% of the reviews were left during just a 2 month period.
Although it's not quite as clear cut as the Facebook reviews, the suspicious patterns lead me to conclude that the majority of these reviews are fake. For balance the first 5 appear genuine, but in my opinion most of, if not all of the other 28 are fake.