Analysis Last week, connectivity-hardware maker Belkin admitted that one of its employees had been using Amazon's Mechanical Turk hiring service to pay for positive - and false - reviews of Belkin products.

While we congratulate Belkin for quickly admitting its employee's unethical behavior, and while we can only assume that said employee - identified by Engadget as bizdev rep Michael Bayard - has either joined the growing ranks of the unemployed or is now on a very short lease, the entire affair raises a larger question: How reliable are user-generated reviews, anyway?

More specifically, how can an online reviews service ensure that the product evaluations that its users contribute aren't tainted by self-serving bias?

After speaking with spokesfolks from a selection of online reviews sites, we've concluded that there's no way user-generated reviews can be guaranteed one-hundred per cent accurate.